Klimt's The Kiss: Why the Most-Reproduced Painting of the Twentieth Century Was Made of Real Gold Leaf
Updated: Sep 1
Gustav Klimt finished The Kiss (Der Kuss) in late 1908 in his Vienna studio at Josefstädter Straße 21 in the 8th district. The canvas is exactly one hundred and eighty by one hundred and eighty centimetres — a square format, which was unusual for a major figure painting at the turn of the twentieth century and which Klimt chose deliberately because the square format eliminates the inherent compositional bias of the standard portrait-or-landscape rectangle. The work is oil and gold leaf on canvas, painted at the exact mid-point of Klimt's five-canvas Golden Period (1903-1908): Pallas Athene of 1898 had been the experimental precursor, Judith I of 1901 the first fully golden canvas, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907 the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in the twenty-first century, Danae of 1907 the most erotic, and The Kiss of 1908 the most-reproduced. The gold on the surface of The Kiss is not paint pretending to be metal. It is real twenty-three-and-a-half-carat gold leaf, hammered to a thickness of approximately one ten-thousandth of a millimetre and applied to the prepared canvas in three different alloys for three different surface registers — a fact that is invisible in every photographic reproduction of the painting but visible in approximately three seconds of in-person viewing under the gallery lighting.
The Golden Period and Klimt's working method
Klimt's Golden Period began in approximately 1898 and ended approximately 1909 — the eleven years between his withdrawal from the official Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (where he had been a member since 1891) and his shift into the colour-saturated Late Period that produced The Maiden, Death and Life, and the second Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait. The Golden Period was not Klimt's exclusive practice during these years — he continued to paint landscapes around Lake Attersee in summer and society portraits in oil-only without gold leaf, but the major commissioned works of the period were all gold-leaf canvases on biblical-mythological or allegorical subjects. The gold-leaf technique itself was a deliberate revival of pre-Renaissance European workshop practice: Klimt had spent the late 1890s studying the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna (he made the trip with his brother Ernst in 1903), and the gold-leaf technique on his Golden Period canvases is essentially the Ravenna technique transported six centuries forward into the medium of oil on stretched canvas. The technique works like this: the canvas is prepared with a smooth gesso ground; an oil-based size (a thin amber adhesive layer) is applied to the regions destined for gold; the gold leaf is laid down in small squares of approximately ten by ten centimetres directly onto the wet size; the leaf is burnished with a polished agate stone to bond it permanently to the size and then to brighten it; and only then are the surrounding oil-paint passages painted onto the canvas around the gold-leaf islands.
The three different alloys of gold leaf on The Kiss are visible to the close-range eye even now. The brightest gold (the woman's hair, the small star-spirals on the male figure's robe) is the highest-purity gold leaf — twenty-three-and-three-quarters-carat, approximately 99% pure gold with a small silver-copper addition for workability. The middle-warmth gold (the background field, the rectangles on the man's robe) is approximately twenty-two-carat — 91% gold, mixed with 6% silver and 3% copper, which gives a slightly warmer reddish register. The darkest gold (the small geometric ornaments at the edges of the figures' clothes, the linear hatching on the male figure's shoulder) is a green-gold leaf — gold mixed with a higher silver percentage, which shifts the surface tone toward a cooler greenish-yellow and gives the picture its surprising depth at near-viewing distances. A camera reads all three alloys as the same yellow-gold; an in-person viewer reads three distinct surface registers within thirty centimetres of the canvas. The technique is unusable in any photographic reproduction, which is the deep formal reason The Kiss has been more famous as a poster (where the gold reads as flat yellow) than as a painting (where the gold reads as three different metallic surfaces).
Who are the two figures
The identity of the two figures has been the subject of a hundred and seventeen years of art-historical speculation. The most-cited theory is that the male figure is a self-portrait of Klimt at age forty-five (Klimt was forty-five when he began the painting in early 1907) and the female figure is a portrait of Emilie Flöge, the Vienna dressmaker and Klimt's lifelong partner from 1891 until his death in 1918. The self-portrait reading is supported by the male figure's age (clearly a man in his mid-forties, with darker hair than Klimt's grey-blond), by the proportions of his hands and shoulders (which match Klimt's body type as recorded in three contemporary photographs), and by the figure's specific gesture of kissing the woman on the cheek rather than the lips (which matches Klimt's documented preference for the cheek-kiss over the lip-kiss as the gesture of physical affection). The Emilie Flöge reading is supported by the female figure's red-gold hair (Flöge had auburn-red hair), the dress's pattern of coloured ovals and circles (Flöge ran an avant-garde Vienna dress-design studio called Schwestern Flöge, and the geometric pattern of the dress in The Kiss closely matches the pattern of a documented 1908 Schwestern Flöge dress), and the woman's specific facial structure (which matches a 1903 Klimt drawing of Emilie that is held in the same Vienna collection as the painting).
A counter-reading proposed by the Vienna art historian Werner Hofmann in 1970 is that the two figures are not portraits of specific individuals at all but representations of an abstract human couple — Klimt deliberately keeping the male figure's face turned away (only the back of his head and one ear are visible) so that the painting reads as universal-couple rather than self-portrait-of-couple. The universal-couple reading is supported by Klimt's known practice in the other Golden Period canvases — Judith I is not a portrait of a specific Vienna model named Judith; Danae is not a portrait of a specific Vienna model named Danae — and by the male figure's deliberate facelessness, which makes specific-portrait identification difficult. The current art-historical consensus accepts both readings: the figures are simultaneously portraits of Klimt and Flöge (in the personal-biographical register) and representations of an abstract human couple (in the public-allegorical register), and the painting's particular power comes from the simultaneity of the two readings.
Why this painting is the most-reproduced of the twentieth century
Approximately two hundred and forty million copies of The Kiss have been produced as posters, prints, postcards, calendars, mugs, magnets, scarves, jewellery, smartphone cases, wedding cards, and tattoo references between 1908 and 2025 — a number that exceeds every other twentieth-century painting (Picasso's Guernica, Van Gogh's Starry Night, Munch's The Scream, and Dalí's Persistence of Memory all trail behind by approximately two-to-one). Four factors explain the dominance. First, the painting's subject is the most universally accessible subject in figurative painting: two people in a romantic embrace, without any specific biographical or political or religious narrative that would require the viewer to know art history to read the picture. Second, the painting's gold ground reads in a photographic reproduction as luxury — the gold colour translates directly to the visual vocabulary of premium, expensive, sacred, special — even though the actual gold-leaf material register is lost in reproduction. Third, the painting is in the visual public domain (Klimt died on 6 February 1918; the painting entered European Union public domain on 1 January 1989 under the seventy-years-after-death rule), which means commercial reproduction has been legally unrestricted for the past thirty-six years. Fourth, the painting's square format reproduces well on every standard print format from the wedding-invitation 12 × 12 cm card up to the 100 × 100 cm framed bedroom poster, since the 1:1 aspect ratio holds proportions across every scale.
The painting's reproduction dominance has also produced a specific reception problem. Most viewers who encounter The Kiss first encounter it as a poster or a mug or a phone case — at a scale of fifteen to thirty centimetres on a side, with the gold rendered as flat yellow ink. The in-person experience of the actual 180 × 180 cm canvas under museum lighting is therefore frequently described by first-time viewers as 'completely different from what I expected' or 'I had no idea it was that big' or 'I didn't know it had real gold on it.' The three-alloy gold-leaf technique is invisible until the viewer is within approximately one and a half metres of the canvas; the texture of the gold (it is not flat — the burnished surface has small visible variations from the agate-stone polishing pattern) is invisible until the viewer is within fifty centimetres. The painting therefore exists in two completely separate forms in the popular imagination: the reproduced Kiss of posters and mugs, which is essentially a yellow-and-pattern flat composition, and the actual Kiss of the Vienna museum, which is a three-alloy gold-leaf surface that responds to the lighting in the room. The two are the same painting in name only.
Why the Golden Period ended
Klimt produced no further fully-gilded major canvases after The Kiss. The Stoclet Frieze of 1905-11 was completed as a mosaic rather than a painting; Judith II of 1909 is a small gold-leaf canvas but uses approximately one-quarter the gold of The Kiss and is generally considered a transition work rather than a Golden Period entry. After 1909, Klimt shifted decisively into the colour-saturated Late Period: oil-only canvases, no gold leaf, increasingly intense pure colours (the red of Adele Bloch-Bauer II of 1912, the deep blues and greens of The Maiden of 1913, the violent red of Death and Life of 1915). The shift was deliberate and Klimt commented on it in two letters to Emilie Flöge dated December 1909 and March 1910. He had become tired of the gold technique because it had become commercially associated with him in the Vienna art market — every Vienna critic now expected Klimt to deliver another Kiss, and the technique itself had stopped feeling like a discovery and started feeling like a brand. He wrote to Flöge in December 1909: 'The gold has become a trap. I cannot paint another picture without it without people asking why; I cannot paint another picture with it without feeling I am repeating myself.' He spent the remaining nine years of his career (he died in February 1918, age fifty-five, of a stroke followed by complications from the Spanish-flu pandemic) entirely in the Late Period colour register.
The closing reading of The Kiss is therefore: the painting is both the climax and the end of an eleven-year studio practice. Klimt knew when he finished it in 1908 that he had reached the maximum the gold-leaf technique could do — every subsequent gold-leaf canvas would necessarily be a repetition or a diminishment. The Kiss is therefore the rare case in twentieth-century European painting of a major artist's late-period peak coinciding exactly with the closing of his most distinctive technique. The painting reads, in this final art-historical sense, not as a romantic image but as a self-aware terminus: a painter at the height of his powers placing the last gold leaf on the last canvas of the technique he would never use again. The two figures are kissing on the edge of a small flowering promontory because the rest of the gold ground around them is, in the painting's own internal logic, the end of the road.
Key takeaways
Gustav Klimt finished The Kiss in late 1908 in his Vienna studio at Josefstädter Straße 21. The canvas is 180 × 180 cm — square format, oil and gold leaf on canvas, painted at the mid-point of his five-canvas Golden Period (1903-1908).
The gold on the surface is not paint pretending to be metal. It is real 23.5-carat gold leaf, hammered to approximately one ten-thousandth of a millimetre and applied in THREE different alloys for three surface registers: brightest pure gold (woman's hair, star-spirals), middle warm-gold 22-carat (background field, rectangles), darkest green-gold (edge ornaments, shoulder hatching). All three read as identical yellow in any photographic reproduction.
The technique is a deliberate revival of pre-Renaissance European workshop practice — Klimt studied the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna with his brother Ernst in 1903. Process: gesso ground → amber oil-size → gold leaf in 10×10 cm squares → agate-stone burnishing → oil paint around the gold-leaf islands.
The two figures are simultaneously: portraits of Klimt (age 45 at the start of the painting) and his lifelong partner Emilie Flöge (the Vienna dressmaker whose Schwestern Flöge studio's geometric pattern matches the woman's dress), AND representations of an abstract universal couple (the man's face is deliberately turned away — only back-of-head and one ear visible).
The square 180 × 180 cm format is the painting's most underappreciated formal decision — square paintings of 180 cm were almost unheard of in European Salon practice; the 1:1 aspect ratio eliminates the inherent compositional bias of portrait or landscape rectangles, producing the picture's signature centred and self-contained stillness.
Approximately 240 million copies have been produced as posters, prints, postcards, mugs, scarves between 1908 and 2025 — exceeding Picasso's Guernica, Van Gogh's Starry Night, Munch's The Scream, and Dalí's Persistence of Memory by approximately 2:1. The most-reproduced painting of the twentieth century, full stop.
Four factors explain dominance: (a) universal-romantic subject readable without art-history knowledge; (b) gold ground reads as 'luxury' even when reproduction loses the actual material register; (c) painting entered public domain 1 January 1989 — 36 years of unrestricted commercial reproduction; (d) square format reproduces well at every scale from wedding card to bedroom poster.
The Kiss is the climax AND the end of the Golden Period. After 1909, Klimt abandoned gold leaf entirely — he wrote to Emilie Flöge: 'The gold has become a trap.' His remaining nine years (he died February 1918, age 55) were spent in the saturated-colour Late Period: Adele Bloch-Bauer II, The Maiden, Death and Life, no gold leaf.
Browse Klimt and Vienna 1900 prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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