Come for a Kiss
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, it demands interrogation despite being ubiquitous.
Arresting, Gilded Glamour
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. 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. It is compelling.
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, making her stance fleeting.
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’ necks, hair, faces vs their clothes, the meadow and the void could almost be from entirely different worlds: 3d vs 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 the viewer moved, so did The Kiss: the flowers seem to ‘blend’ together giving the illusion of wind through petals, metallic stars dance in the void, the robes glint and glimmer which makes you 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 man’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 (somewhat 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 harnessed in the moment. Her stance is curious: reminding us of her agency, willingness and intention? The kiss is happening to her, but it appears to be 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 appears to be giving her protection by covering half of her visible form. She offers a cheek and he’s giving her the mouth and face. 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 so maybe she is giving him growth? The squares on the masculine character’s clothes could look like doors, perhaps Love could be a door to opportunity for the feminine character.
Scale is important because the people are almost life-sized, occupying ~ 75% of 1.7m in height. Scale indicates importance, grandeur and the anonymity of subject generalises these Lovers to be Anyone In Love.
When the viewer moved, so did The Kiss: the flowers seem to ‘blend’ together giving the illusion of wind through petals, metallic stars dance in the void, the robes glint and glimmer which makes you 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 man’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 (somewhat 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 harnessed in the moment. Her stance is curious: reminding us of her agency, willingness and intention? The kiss is happening to her, but it appears to be 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 appears to be giving her protection by covering half of her visible form. She offers a cheek and he’s giving her the mouth and face. 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 so maybe she is giving him growth? The squares on the masculine character’s clothes could look like doors, perhaps Love could be a door to opportunity for the feminine character.
Scale is important because the people are almost life-sized, occupying ~ 75% of 1.7m in height. Scale indicates importance, grandeur and the anonymity of subject generalises these Lovers to be Anyone In Love.
To Kiss or Be Kissed
My favorite part of this painting is the Kiss itself: it’s not on the mouth! It isn’t about the obvious, perhaps because this secondary cheek-kiss is more intimate given their relationship. The clothes appear erotically charged through their color vibrancy and decoration, flushed cheeks and willing passivity signal this could be about romantic love. It doesn’t look friendly.
Criticisms of The Kiss often cite female passivity. To query this: is it passive to accept service?
Serving or served?
Klimt’s intention in stance and kiss could be to convey that for lovers, acts not necessarily ‘public displays of affection’ can feel shocking and private to witness because of the energy they are charged with. It’s like being at a bar and knowing the two people sat opposite each other on their phones, ignoring each other, are married.
This is a dynamic painting because of the effect of movement in the meadow, and because it captures a single moment in time that typically doesn’t last very long. Ephemerality indicated through stance and the unnatural brightness of the world occupied could pitch this as a journey of shared movement, a becoming ‘Liebespaar’ i.e. falling in love (made more powerful by you as viewer-voyeur falling into the dizzying decoration and void).
It could equally symbolise a journey more lewd and differently explosive, but by drenching it in precious metals and painting it 6ft tall, Klimt makes this something Holy.
Two Liebespaar on their way to seeing The Kiss
My favorite part of this painting is the Kiss itself: it’s not on the mouth! It isn’t about the obvious, perhaps because this secondary cheek-kiss is more intimate given their relationship. The clothes appear erotically charged through their color vibrancy and decoration, flushed cheeks and willing passivity signal this could be about romantic love. It doesn’t look friendly.
Criticisms of The Kiss often cite female passivity. To query this: is it passive to accept service?
Klimt’s intention in stance and kiss could be to convey that for lovers, acts not necessarily ‘public displays of affection’ can feel shocking and private to witness because of the energy they are charged with. It’s like being at a bar and knowing the two people sat opposite each other on their phones, ignoring each other, are married.
This is a dynamic painting because of the effect of movement in the meadow, and because it captures a single moment in time that typically doesn’t last very long. Ephemerality indicated through stance and the unnatural brightness of the world occupied could pitch this as a journey of shared movement, a becoming ‘Liebespaar’ i.e. falling in love (made more powerful by you as viewer-voyeur falling into the dizzying decoration and void).
It could equally symbolise a journey more lewd and differently explosive, but by drenching it in precious metals and painting it 6ft tall, Klimt makes this something Holy.
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