The Kiss by Gustav Klimt: Great Art Explained

By the end of the 19th century, Vienna, an uptight, stuffy and conservative city, was changing. A group of artists, architects, musicians and social scientists were experimenting in ways which would transform their individual fields. On the one hand, Vienna was the traditional city of academic art, Johann Strauss and the Habsburg Empire. But on the other, it was the home of radical artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, who were shocking audiences with explorations of sexual themes. Architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos were challenging imperial design, while Gustav Mahler was transforming the musical life of the city. And Sigmund Freud was about to change forever the way we think about the human mind. Vienna was experiencing a new golden age. It was a city at the forefront of modernity and it would shape the 20th century. In 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the building of the Ringstrasse. It is a series of tree-lined boulevards that circle the city. The bourgeoisie of Vienna rushed to build huge mansions on the Ringstrasse, alongside new public buildings. These ostentatious palaces needed to be decorated and Gustav Klimt and his brother were very successful mural painters. Gustav Klimt became one of the world's most famous artists without the usual personality cult we expect. We know very little about him, except that he never married, but was a prodigious lover and left behind 14 children by as many women. He lived with his mother his whole life and was terrified of mental illness. Almost a classic case study for Sigmund Freud. And like Freud, he placed sexuality at the forefront of his work. Klimt didn't go to a fine arts school, but rather an arts and crafts school. A more practical education, where he learned skills and techniques. His lifetime goal was to At the age of 20, Klimt and his younger brother were creating allegorical murals for the new public buildings in Vienna. Their friezes were conservative, mythological images, in keeping with 19th century academic painting. But it is in his background as a decorative artist that we find the roots of Klimt's later, more radical work. When both his brother and father died suddenly, Klimt's art would take a dramatic and darker turn. He would still use allegory and symbolism, but he would transform it into a new language that was more overtly sexual and for some, more disturbing. He was commissioned to decorate the University of Vienna. The paintings would cause a huge public scandal with their sexually provocative themes. And Klimt was accused of producing pornography. Women were advised to stay away from his work, and the paintings were rejected by the university. Klimt formed a radical new society called the Vienna Secession with other young artists. Their aim was to bring art, craft, architecture and design together in one great movement. The Secession broke away from the pompous historical painting fashionable in the late 19th century, and gave contemporary art its first dedicated space. In a nation still very traditional, this can be seen as the formal beginning of modern art in Austria. Ironically, a painting that is seen as a romantic ideal by many, was painted by a man who was never romantically involved, and was afraid of intimacy. A man who had an obsession with sex, bedded most of his models as well as his subjects, but went home each night to the unmarried sisters. The painting is square. At six foot by six foot, it is practically life-size, making us connect to it on a human scale. It is self-contained and deceptively simple. It shows Klimt as the consummate draftsman, an artist who drew every day from life models. There are several things which make the Kiss unique. The deliberate contrast between the realistically rendered flesh and the two-dimensional abstract ornamentation, creates an effect almost like photo montage. The bodies are painted with a cool contemporary sensuality. They are encased like an ancient Egyptian mummy, in cascades of gold and abstract patterns, and everything appears to float in a golden cosmos, outside of time and space. The background is Klimt's new technical invention. He covered the entire canvas with sheets of gold leaf, and then painted over the gold with a dark wash, which he then flicked with flakes of gold on top. If we look at where the background meets the meadow, which is primed in the conventional way, we can see how the artist was playing with different textures. He used eight different types of gold in the Kiss. He also builds up texture underneath the gold leaf, to give it a three-dimensional aspect, to catch the light, in the same way Byzantine mosaics do. It is gold that we think of when we think of Klimt. His father was a goldsmith, and Klimt had a lifelong fascination with the precious metal. He travelled to Ravenna to see the Byzantine mosaics, a major influence on his golden period. The Kiss, with the dazzling glow of an altarpiece, has become an icon for the post-religious age, and the gold surrounding them almost hints at a halo. Gold leaf is fragile and comes in gossamer thin sheets. For the relief sections, Klimt would use gesso, which is a mixture of animal glue and chalk dust. He would paint the thick mixture on in the required pattern, and then apply the gold leaf. The excess was then discarded. Apart from gold, the other precious metal we see here looks like silver, but is in fact platinum. More expensive than gold, but unlike silver, it doesn't oxidise. There is more pure gold than you think in the Kiss. If we look at this ultraviolet scan, all of the parts which are dark, including the background, have a layer of pure gold leaf. Only the white patches reveal where there is no gold. Even after applying gold leaf to the surface, we can see how Klimt is happy to paint over the gold and mix both materials and textures. He doesn't use gold for its realistic qualities. It is too shiny and reflective of light, but rather as an object of desire. Gold is an indicator of wealth, and its resistance to tarnishing has ensured it was used to decorate the tombs of gods and in religious paintings for centuries. Klimt uses gold to confer status on the nouveau riche women of Vienna, to suggest opulence, wealth and beauty. The theme was not new, but the overt eroticism was. Klimt knew Edvard Munch's painting from over 10 years before, and both artists were aware of Rodin's even earlier sculpture. The first time Klimt painted an embrace, he shows a romantic couple about to kiss. The artist, who avoided any form of romantic relationship, places the disembodied figures of old age, disease and death above the young couple. Passion, he tells us, is fraught with uncertainty. The Beethoven frieze was part of a successful group show of the secessionists, inspired by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, a watershed in both Vienna's and Klimt's artistic evolution. The frieze by Klimt features an embracing couple, similar in both composition and aesthetics to the kiss. Love here is surrounded by demonic creatures. The Stocklit frieze, a privately commissioned mosaic, features an embrace of an erotic nature, a similar motif to the kiss. As in the Stocklit frieze, Klimt suggests the couple in the kiss are naked under their garments. It is worth reminding ourselves what the average Viennese couple were wearing at the time, to understand why it was considered so provocative. Klimt was an admirer of Aubrey Beardsley, and the clothes were inspired by his Art Nouveau style, as well as the organic forms of the arts and crafts movement. The clothes are a visual metaphor for the emotional and physical expression of erotic love. His robe is emblazoned with upright black rectangles, a symbol of thrusting masculinity. Her robe is studded with whorls and spirals, said to symbolize the over. I don't think it's an accident that the shape of the entwined couple is itself a golden phallic symbol. Klimt's figures often have a stiff statue-like appearance, and he was said to be inspired by the Belgian sculptor Georges Min, who used what was called the perfect gothic body, slim, expressive and youthful. Min was also influential for younger Austrian artists like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, both followers of Klimt. Like Monet and Van Gogh, Klimt collected Japanese prints, which were hugely influential. Japonisme can be seen in the very simplified composition, but also in the tight cropping, with the man's head painted very close to the top of the canvas, a departure from traditional western art. Klimt's complicated feelings towards love come out in the kiss, and the figures are pictured on a patch of flowery meadow, but they are teetering at the edge of a cliff. Despite the religious comparisons with icons, the lovers, with garlands in their hair, have a distinctly pagan look. The man wears a crown of vines, and the woman wears a crown of flowers, suggesting that this is the consummation of some kind of ritual. One theory is that in this picture, Klimt is representing the myth of Apollo and Daphne, from Ovid's Metamorphosis. Most artists, when depicting the story, show the moment Daphne is running from Apollo, as she begs the gods to transform her into a laurel tree, to protect her from Apollo's advances. But the last paragraph of Metamorphosis refers specifically to a kiss, after she has transformed into a tree, which is rarely portrayed. The legs of the woman in the kiss seem to be sinking into the ground, as tendrils of golden laurel leaves emanating from her body, root themselves into the meadow, and suggest Daphne's transformation into a laurel tree. The man's face is not shown to the viewer. Klimt almost exclusively painted women, and when men did feature in his paintings, they were just an accessory. He is bent downwards to press a kiss to the woman's cheek, and his hands are cradling the woman's face, which is turned towards the viewer. Her eyes are closed, like a trance, or in ecstasy. She has one arm wrapped around the man's neck, the other resting gently on his hand, and her face is upturned to receive the man's kiss. Or is it? One of the great mysteries of the kiss is who are the models? It is suggested that this is a portrait of Klimt and Emilie Flöger. She was a businesswoman and an avant-garde fashion designer, a woman way ahead of her time, and a companion to Klimt for 27 years. It seems that the relationship may have begun as an infatuation on his part, but matured into an extremely close friendship that was intellectually and emotionally intimate, rather than physical. The actual life model was more likely to be a woman known as Red Hilda, who she bears a strong resemblance to. She was the model for many of his paintings, and one of Klimt's many There has been endless debate about what exactly is the relationship between the couple. Is it romantic? Is she bending to receive the kiss, or turning away? If we do take it as an allegorical portrait of Klimt and Flöger, then the ambiguity of the relationship in the painting is a perfect reflection of their own ambiguous relationship. The man tries to kiss her, but she turns her head away. There is a tenderness there, an acceptance of affection, but she is not compliant. Her eyes and mouth are firmly closed, unusual for Klimt's paintings where the woman often has an open sexualized mouth. Could the kiss, long thought to be the most romantic painting in history, actually be a depiction of a platonic relationship? When it was shown in Vienna, it was immediately bought by the Austrian government. Klimt's work, once considered pornographic and deviant, was put on display in one of the imperial palaces. Gustav Klimt would be part of the last cultural explosion before the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A political entity that was ridiculously antiquated in its day, and was to die in the same year that Klimt did, 1918. Egon Schiele would die just a few months later. And just like that, an intense period of creativity and vitality drew to an end. Klimt is often dismissed by critics today as an artist who simply produced decorative artifice. But his work served as an important role in bridging academic realism and the coming world of abstraction. He pushed the boundaries of what Freud called the misunderstood and much maligned erotic, and depicted the human figure as never before. And then he gave us the kiss, one of the most compelling and truthful images of the 20th century. We don't really know about Klimt's thoughts on the kiss, but maybe we don't need to. As he once said, if you want to know about me, just look at my paintings.