The Kiss

On the canvas

Ten toes at the edge of the drop

Start in the bottom right corner. A woman's feet push out from under the gold — the only point where the couple touches the ground. The toes are curled, the arch tensed. A few centimetres away the carpet of flowers stops at a ragged edge, and beyond it lies flat gold: no horizon, no shadow, no depth.

The canvas is square, 180 by 180 centimetres, taller than most people standing in front of it. The man leans down, but he is not kissing her mouth. He kisses her cheek. Her head is tipped back and turned almost into profile, eyelids shut, a pink flush on the cheekbone. Of his face you see nothing: the back of the head, dark hair, a tight wreath of leaves and tendrils. One hand sits under her jaw, the other steadies her temple — the grip you use on something breakable.

Her hands answer differently. One covers his fingers at her cheek; the other hooks around his neck, knuckles standing out. Nothing here is relaxed. Small flowers and star-shaped dots run through her hair, and a red strand falls down her back.

Then the thing most people walk straight past: the picture is painted two ways at once. Skin is modelled softly, with real light and shade — cheeks, hands and feet swell out of the surface. Everything else is flat as enamel. In all that gold only three colours actually work: vermilion, cobalt and the green of the meadow. The signature sits low on the right in a small square panel: GVSTAV KLIMT.

Step back three paces and the figures dissolve. What remains is a shape: a golden column widening towards the top, two heads on it, a cushion of flowers underneath. That silhouette is what went on to fill postcards and mugs. Step close and the painting stops being an image and becomes a surface — the metal lies in layers, and the highlights shift the moment you move a foot sideways.

How it was made

A garden studio, brass leaf and an X-ray

The work was done in a single-storey studio at the back of a courtyard at Josefstädter Straße 21, in Vienna's eighth district. Klimt rented it from 1892 and kept it until 1911, when the building came down; a door opened straight onto the garden. Nobody commissioned the picture. He painted it for himself and showed it at an exhibition he had organised.

The Kunstschau opened on 1 June 1908 and ran to 16 November. Josef Hoffmann put up a temporary timber complex of roughly 6,500 square metres on the ground where the Wiener Konzerthaus stands today. Klimt was given Room 22, designed by Koloman Moser, and hung sixteen paintings in it. The catalogue did not call this one The Kiss; it was listed as Liebespaar, The Lovers. The title we use appears only in the 1909 catalogue supplement.

The Belvedere's technical record describes a build-up in stages. A thin brass-alloy leaf went down first over the areas that needed it — that is what the background is made of. Real gold, silver and platinum leaf were then laid on selectively. A dark brown resin-oil glaze followed, and into it Klimt scattered tiny metal flakes, a trick close to Japanese maki-e lacquer. The man's cloak is covered in gold leaf with the pattern painted on top; the woman's dress mixes leaf with coloured ornament.

X-radiography shows the picture was reworked: the legs were lengthened, the pattern of the cloak altered, and those changes came after the 1908 show. The state really did buy an unfinished canvas — the Modern Gallery took delivery only on 22 July 1909. Who sat for it is unknown. Emilie Flöge, Alma Mahler and a red-haired model remembered as Red Hilda all get named in the literature, and not one of them is documented. The Albertina holds drawings of embracing couples from 1907 and 1908, but only a handful relate directly to this composition.

Roots

An embrace six years in rehearsal

The couple fused into a single mass had been in Klimt's hands long before this canvas. In 1902, at the Secession's fourteenth exhibition, he unveiled the Beethoven Frieze: on the final wall a man and a woman lock together beneath a choir of angels, beside Schiller's line about a kiss for the whole world. There the embrace was a closing chord, tiny against a long procession of figures.

Between 1905 and 1911 he designed the frieze for the dining room of the Stoclet palace in Brussels, Josef Hoffmann's building. The panel is called Fulfilment; in the early sketches, simply Embrace. Same posture, same hand at the cheek. But it was not painted: craftsmen of the Wiener Werkstätte assembled it from marble, ceramic, gilded tile, enamel and semi-precious stone, working from nine full-size cartoons. The Kiss is the easel version of a wall.

The gold came from Ravenna. Klimt went twice in 1903, in May and again in December, and saw the mosaics of San Vitale, where Justinian and Theodora stand on gold with no space around them. What he brought back was not a subject but a principle: background as substance rather than air.

A comparison sharpens it. In The Starry Night Van Gogh lets the background riot; his sky is more alive than his village. Klimt does the opposite. He shuts the background down into motionless metal and leaves all the movement to two faces and four hands. Three decades later Frida Kahlo takes on the same problem from the other end in The Two Fridas, cutting one person into two figures and joining them not with ornament but with an artery.

What happened next

Inventory number 912

The Kiss has never had a private owner. It went from the Kunstschau straight into state hands: the ministry of culture and education bought it in July 1908 for 25,000 crowns, the largest sum the gallery had ever paid for the work of a living artist. In the Belvedere's inventory it is number 912.

At first it travelled. Rome, the International Art Exhibition of 1911; Dresden, the Great Art Exhibition of 1912. Then the other history began. The Modern Gallery closed on 22 March 1938, and from September 1944 the Belvedere was taking bomb damage.

The worst loss was not its own. From 1943 pictures evacuated from Vienna were stored at Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria, among them a large group of Klimts from the Lederer collection. On 8 May 1945 the castle burned, and with it Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, the three vast panels Klimt had painted for the University of Vienna. They are known today only from black-and-white photographs. The Kiss was not on that list.

In 1954 the Austrian Gallery reopened in the Upper Belvedere with the painting on show. A few more trips followed — Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Bern in 1956–57, Zurich in 1992 — and after 1997 it stopped leaving Vienna. It now hangs on the top floor of the Upper Belvedere, in a room where nothing is allowed to compete with it, and usually behind a low wall of raised phones.

Afterlife

The gold that got reprinted a million times

The first serious response came from inside Klimt's own circle. In 1912 Egon Schiele painted Caress, better known as Cardinal and Nun: the same kneeling pair, the same tilt of the heads, but the gold is gone, replaced by red and black, and the faces are frightened. It hangs in Vienna's Leopold Museum and reads as a direct reply to the older man.

The art historian Werner Hofmann put his finger on why the picture holds. Klimt moved the old tension between man and woman out of the bodies and into the ornament, where it became a programme of contrasts. That is also why the image survives any scale: the silhouette reads on a phone screen exactly as it does on a two-metre canvas, which is how it ends up printed on almost anything.

Official Austria confirmed the status in metal. In 2003 the Mint issued a 100-euro gold coin, Painting, with Klimt in his working smock in the studio on one side and The Kiss on the other: 16 grams of .986 gold, 30,000 struck. The 50-euro series Klimt and His Women, running from 2012, closed in 2016 with the same image.

Newer experiments followed. On 14 February 2022 the Belvedere cut a digital copy into 10,000 tiles and offered them as NFTs at 1,850 euros each; only a minority sold in the opening days, and resale prices later slid well below the issue price. In 2023 came the documentary Klimt & The Kiss, directed by Ali Ray, filmed at the Belvedere in May and released to cinemas on 30 October. In a little over a century the painting has become a coin, a token and a film — and there is still exactly one place on earth to see the thing itself.