Klimt | The Kiss

About The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

Klimt painted The Kiss in 1907–08, at the height of what is now called his Golden Period, and it remains the most celebrated work of the Vienna Secession. Two figures kneel on a flowering meadow at the edge of a gold void, wrapped together in a single robe.

Klimt had trained alongside his father, a gold engraver, and had recently travelled to Ravenna, where the Byzantine mosaics of San Vitale made a lasting impression. Both show here. The robe is divided by pattern into two halves — hard black-and-white rectangles for the man, soft concentric circles and flowers for the woman — so that the figures read simultaneously as one shape and two people.

Only the hands, faces and feet are rendered naturalistically. Everything else is ornament. The canvas is square, a little over a metre and a half on each side.

Own a hand-painted The Kiss

It matters here because The Kiss is almost entirely surface. The picture is a field of ornament — spirals, rectangles, flowers — worked in metallic tones that catch and throw light as you move past them. Printing renders all of that as flat yellow ink on paper, which is the one thing gold is not. Painted by hand in oils, the ornament regains its depth and the surface behaves the way the picture depends on.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above. The original is square, and the composition sits best in a square or near-square format.
• Framed and ready to hang, gallery wrap, or rolled canvas if you would rather frame it yourself.
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