The Kiss

The Kiss, completed in 1907–1908 and permanently held at the Belvedere in Vienna, is Klimt's most universally recognised work and the defining image of the Vienna Secession and Viennese Art Nouveau. The painting was acquired by the Austrian state immediately upon its first public exhibition, an unusual act of official recognition for an artist who had been embroiled in public controversy throughout the previous decade. The couple locked in embrace kneels at the edge of a flowering precipice, the man bending to kiss the woman's cheek. Both figures are enveloped in a single golden garment that merges their identities, the man's decorated with rectangular black-and-white geometric units and the woman's with floral roundels — a gendered ornamental language Klimt would repeat in the Stoclet Frieze's Fulfillment. The use of actual gold leaf on oil and silver on canvas gives the surface a sacred, almost iconic quality that draws on the Byzantine mosaics Klimt studied at Ravenna in 1903. Despite its apparent celebration of romantic union, the relationship between the two figures is not entirely equal — the woman's expression is closer to passive surrender than shared desire — a tension art historians have frequently examined. The Kiss occupies a position in European cultural memory comparable to the Mona Lisa: instantly identifiable, massively reproduced, and endlessly interpreted.

Oil and gold leaf on canvas, with silver leaf and platinum leaf in select areas. The ground preparation supports real metal leaf applied in sheets and tooled with pattern. The surrounding field of flowers at the couple's knees is painted with dense short strokes in yellow, white, and green against a dark ground. The figures' flesh passages are smoothly painted in a warm naturalistic manner that contrasts with the hard-edged metallic ornament.