Gustav Klimt - The Kiss (1907-1908): The Painting Behind the Gold
- Zocine Art
- Jun 23
- 6 min read
If you searched 'Gustav Klimt - The Kiss', this is the painting. One hundred and eighty centimetres square of oil paint and applied gold leaf, finished between 1907 and 1908 at the peak of Klimt's so-called Golden Phase. Two figures kneel on a small patch of flowering meadow at the edge of an abyss. The man, draped in a long robe patterned with black-and-white rectangles, leans down to kiss the woman on the cheek. She kneels facing him, head tilted to receive the kiss, eyes closed, her robe patterned with bright circles, her hair garlanded with violets and ivy. Behind and around them, a wash of golden particles dissolves into nothing.
The Kiss is the single most reproduced painting of the early twentieth century, and the most luxurious surface in Klimt's catalogue. It is also one of the most quietly strange. The figures are clothed, the embrace is restrained, the heads are bent inward, the world around them is gold. Whatever the painting is finally about (love, surrender, mortality, the threshold of a different state), it stays exactly at the moment before the kiss lands.
What the painting shows
Klimt arranges everything around two robes that meet in the middle. The man's robe falls in a long rectangle from his shoulder to the meadow, decorated with vertical black-and-white blocks and small spirals. The woman's robe wraps around her in soft curves, decorated with concentric coloured circles and oval flower-forms. The two patterns press against each other where the bodies meet, and the painting reads as the moment two visual systems agree to share a single frame.
The faces are deliberately small inside the overall composition. The man's profile is in shadow; we see the line of his jaw, a corner of his mouth, the curve of an ear. The woman's face is fully turned toward us in three-quarter view, eyes shut, lips slightly parted, cheek pressed against the man's lower lip. Her right hand grips his neck. His left hand cradles her head. Everything below the chest dissolves into the long fall of the robes and the gold ground beyond.
The meadow is a single narrow strip along the bottom edge. Klimt paints it with the same naturalistic detail as the rest of his late landscapes: tiny daisies, violets, irises, sprigs of ivy, a band of green. The woman's bare feet curl over the meadow's edge into nothing. There is no horizon, no sky, no implied middle distance. The two figures are on a small island in a sea of gold.
Why the gold
Klimt went to Ravenna twice, in 1903 and 1904, to look at the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. The mosaics organise gold tesserae across whole apses, place clothed figures inside the gold without modelling shadows, and use pattern not as decoration but as the building substance of the wall itself. Klimt left Ravenna with the conviction that gold could carry pictorial weight by itself, without depicting anything. The Golden Phase (Adele Bloch-Bauer I, The Kiss, the Stoclet Frieze) is the result of that conviction.
Adele Bloch-Bauer I, painted the same year as The Kiss and shown above, makes the lesson explicit. Adele's dress is a continuous gold-leaf pattern that bleeds into the gold-leaf background; the only naturalistic passages are her face, her shoulders, and her hands. The Kiss takes the same approach and pushes it further: the robes are still patterned, but the patterns belong to the figures rather than the wall, and the wall has dissolved into a particle field with no edge.
Practically, Klimt mixed real applied gold leaf with bronze powder, ochre, and yellow-orange oil paint to extend the gold range. The canvas was prepared with a smooth gesso ground, the leaf was applied in small sections (often in patches a few centimetres across), and the patterns were painted on top in oil. Conservation reports show the gold layer is thin and chemically pure twenty-three-carat leaf, which is why The Kiss still reflects light in person the way it does in 1908 photographs.
1907-1908 in Vienna
Klimt was forty-five when he finished The Kiss. He had broken from the Vienna Academy in 1897, founded the Secession with Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann, then broken from the Secession in 1905 in a dispute over commercial exhibition policy. By 1908 he was the most famous living painter in the German-speaking world, the centre of an informal circle of painters, designers, architects, and writers (Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus) who were collectively inventing what would later be called Viennese modernism.
The Kiss was first shown publicly at the Kunstschau in Vienna in 1908. It was bought from the exhibition by the Austrian state for an unprecedented sum, ahead of any other Klimt acquisition. It has been in an Austrian state collection in Vienna ever since. The Kunstschau catalogue gave the painting its alternate title, Lovers (Liebespaar), which has been quietly dropped in favour of the simpler English The Kiss in almost every reproduction made since the 1960s.
Available as a fine print
The Kiss is available as an archival fine print in the ZocineArtDesign shop. Each print is colour-matched against the gold-leaf canvas reference and printed at scale on a heavy archival paper that catches light close to the way the original surface does. View the listing here.
Direct link: zocineartdesign.etsy.com/listing/1867385667
How to hang this print
The Kiss is a vertical-square heavy gold image with two figures filling almost the entire surface. The hanging notes that work for it are not the notes that work for a landscape print.
Wall colour: warm white, cream, or a soft natural linen. The gold reads richest against light warm grounds. Pure white kills the gold by giving it nothing to lean against; deep navy or olive flattens it.
Frame: thin black, thin walnut, or a slim brushed-gold lip frame. A wide ornate gold frame fights with the gold inside the painting and reads as parody. A cream mat is optional; if used, keep it 8 cm or wider.
Light: a warm-temperature directional source from above or the side. The gold leaf in the original responds to oblique light; the print is flatter but still rewards a low warm beam over flat overhead daylight.
Pairing: a single solo hang is the right register. The Kiss is a statement piece and does not pair down well with smaller decorative work. If pairing, the only painting that holds up beside it is another Klimt (Adele Bloch-Bauer I, the Beethoven Frieze panels, a late landscape) at the same scale.
Room: bedroom, primary living room, the wall behind a reading chair. Avoid the kitchen and the entrance hallway; The Kiss is a slow-look painting that wants a room where the viewer is already sitting down.
Key takeaways
The Kiss is a 180 by 180 centimetre oil-and-gold-leaf painting by Gustav Klimt, finished between 1907 and 1908 at the peak of his Golden Phase.
It shows two clothed figures kneeling on a small patch of flowering meadow, embracing inside a wall of gold particles.
The gold leaf is real twenty-three-carat leaf and was inspired by the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics Klimt studied in Ravenna in 1903.
The painting was bought by the Austrian state from the 1908 Kunstschau in Vienna and has been in a state collection there ever since.
As a fine print it lives best on a warm white wall, in a thin frame, with a single directional warm light, in a slow-look room.
Frequently asked
Who is the woman in The Kiss?
Klimt did not name her. Art historians have suggested Emilie Floge (Klimt's lifelong companion and the dress-designer he most often painted), or Adele Bloch-Bauer, or no specific person at all. The painting is composed to read as a universal embrace rather than a portrait of a particular couple.
How much gold is actually in the painting?
Conservation analysis confirms thin layers of twenty-three-carat gold leaf applied in patches across the background and within the robes, extended with bronze and yellow-orange oil paint. The total gold is small in mass but covers most of the surface.
Why is The Kiss so often given as a wedding gift?
The composition reads as a moment of mutual surrender, both figures consenting, neither dominant, the embrace inside a wall of gold that separates them from the rest of the world. That register makes it a long-running favourite for wedding and anniversary gifts. The painting itself was painted by an unmarried artist who lived with the same woman, Emilie Floge, for almost thirty years without marrying her.
→ Bring The Kiss home: zocineartdesign.etsy.com/listing/1867385667
Browse the full archive of fine prints at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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