Come For A Kiss
I was on Twitter and a clip of Lady Gaga in House of Gucci came up: where her character mistakes Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for a Picasso. When the camera pans to the close up of Klimt’s painting, it was breathtaking: I knew it was time to head to Vienna and see some of his work in person. The Kiss is one of my favorite works of art (I have no original thoughts LOL), and now that I’ve seen it, I want to talk about why.
Stunning Gilded Glamor
The Kiss lives in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna, amongst other Klimts. When I walked in, it was partially obscured by museumgoers heads and my first impression was the popular crop we often see. You know, just half the bodies, no meadow.
I’ll never forget my first full look. Towering powerfully, 1.8m x 1.8m (I’m 1.7m). It demands more attention than you can give in the moment. In the first 30 seconds I was overwhelmed. When I moved to take my camera out, the gold, silver and platinum began dancing, while the black on the guy’s robe pulled me in closer. It’s painful trying to articulate what this looked like, it’s something no 8K HD photo could convey.
Words floating through my head: vitality, alive, powerful, voyeuristic, tender, encapsulating, consuming, glamorous, dizzying, subversive. The memory of seeing it is so visceral I’m struggling to formulate a coherent sentence.
The Kiss is compelling. Here’s why.
Contrast and Balance
There’s bright life in the meadow, the veins in his hands, the flushed cheeks, the man’s active stance and the woman kneeling. This vitality feels ephemeral, emphasized by how you can’t look forever. You know the moment is fleeting. Behind the lovers is unending nothingness flecked with stars of gold and platinum, adding permanence.
The stances themselves are contradictory: the woman is very grounded in that she’s literally touching the Earth – but she could not kneel eternally.
There is strong contrast with color palettes and the realism the humans are painted in, vs abstraction and ‘decoration’ on the clothes and meadow. The humans neck, hair, faces vs their clothes, the meadow and the void could almost be from entirely different worlds: 3d v flat. This speaks about how people in real love are one and the same, woven in a different fabric to the world around them. The lovers themselves are obviously different to each other. The clothes are different, as is the decoration– perhaps symbolizing different body parts.
The contrast of life and void compresses the lovers into their own universe where everything but the other – and Beauty represented in robes, flowers and woman – has faded away. Gold contrasts with subject matter: metal is more lasting than paint, so while a kiss is fleeting, it’s there forever. Love as sublimation might be a theme: gold was only really used in religious European artwork pre-Klimt.
Movement and (e)Motion
When I moved, so did The Kiss: the flowers seem to ‘blend’ together giving me the illusion of wind through their petals, metallic stars dance in the void, the robes glint and glimmer which makes me feel like the lovers are about to get up because their clothes are moving.
Trailing threads from the man’s robe spread into the meadow. For me, this is about love spreading love: they are happy and beautiful, and trailing that right into the ground below. The guy’s clothes appear more rigid decorated in mostly squares, hers are mostly swirls and circular shapes. But her swirls seem to have influenced his overcoat, and she has squares on her arms. This makes me feel like they’re becoming embedded in one another, that ‘embedding’ is driven home further by the inlaid stones in his overcoat.
Motion is in their stance: he’s bending (kinda uncomfortably) and she’s kneeling. That’s not a super natural way for either of them to stand, so this isn’t a relaxed kiss, this is a kiss harnessed in the moment. To me, her stance is curious: is this Klimt reminding us of her agency, willingness and intention? Yes the kiss is happening to her, but is this not a choice? She’s kneeling, but if she wasn’t – would she not tower over him?
The stances also comment on how love is less a give and take, more a give and give. She is giving him surrender, and he’s giving her protection, she’s giving him a cheek and he’s giving her a mouth. There are flowers behind her hand locked in between them: maybe she’s giving him flowers? She has flowers in her hair, and is decorated with Nature– maybe she is giving him growth? The squares on the guy’s clothes also look like doors to me, perhaps Love is a door to opportunity for her.
To Kiss or Be Kissed
My favorite part of this painting is the Kiss itself: it’s not on the mouth! Her mouth is right there and he kisses her cheek. I have a few feelings about this. The clothes were already erotically charged, and the mouth visible adds another element of erotic, making the case that this is about romantic love.
Criticisms of The Kiss often cite how passive the woman is. I saw it differently – is she passive or being served?
I wonder if the intention was to convey that for lovers, acts that are not necessarily ‘public displays of affection’ can feel shocking and private to witness because they are charged with loving energy. They don’t need to kiss on the mouth for you to know they’re in love (Victorians argue, pornographically so…).
Another dimension could be that this is a journey on the way to love– maybe the kiss on the cheek is just the beginning. We’ve always been taught this is a painting of Lovers, as in, they already are, but it could capture the becoming: the falling-in-love (made more powerful by you as viewer-voyeur falling into the dizzying decoration and void). It could also be a journey to something more lewd and uh – differently explosive, but by drenching it in precious metals and painting it 6ft tall, Klimt makes this something Holy.
So. That’s some of why I love The Kiss.