Klimt's The Kiss: Meaning, Symbolism, and the Year It Became Modern Art
- Zocine Art
- May 27
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 17
In a basement studio in Vienna in 1907, Gustav Klimt began painting two embracing figures wrapped in a cloak of patterned gold. He finished the painting the following year. The Kiss is now the second most reproduced image in Western art after the Mona Lisa, and it became modern art's most recognised emblem of intimacy. To read the painting properly, you have to look past the gold.
Klimt made the painting at the height of what art historians call his golden phase — a four-year period between 1903 and 1908 when he laid pure gold leaf into oil paint, borrowed compositional ideas from Byzantine mosaic and Japanese woodblock, and built canvases that read as much as decorative objects as paintings.
Here is what is in the picture, what it meant in 1908, and why it still travels so far.
The painting at a glance
The Kiss shows a man and a woman kneeling on a flower-strewn ground, locked in an embrace. The man stands over the woman; he is in profile, leaning down. She is shown three-quarters, eyes closed, face tilted up to meet his. Both figures are wrapped in a single decorated cloak.
Rectangles for the man. The man's cloak is patterned with black-and-white rectangles — straight lines, hard edges, the geometric of masculine decoration.
Circles and ovals for the woman. Her cloak carries circles, ovals, and small flowers — soft, biomorphic, organic shapes. The contrast is deliberate.
Gold ground. There is no horizon, no room, no setting — the figures stand against a flat gold field that flattens depth and makes the embrace into a kind of icon.
Flowers underfoot. The ground is a meadow of flowers, painted in dense Symbolist detail — a counter-weight to the abstract gold above.
Vienna in 1907: why Klimt painted this
Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century was the centre of an intellectual upheaval — Freud was writing Interpretation of Dreams in the same neighbourhood; Mahler was at the Court Opera; Schiele and Kokoschka were emerging in the studios. Klimt, who had once been the establishment painter of the Vienna Ring decorations, had broken away in 1897 to form the Vienna Secession. The Kiss was painted at the moment when Vienna was redefining what serious art could look like.
The gold-leaf technique
Klimt used real gold leaf, beaten thin enough to be applied directly to the canvas surface in patterned sheets. His father had been a gold engraver; Klimt grew up watching the trade. The gold is not symbolic decoration — it is a technical revival, a reach back to Byzantine icon painting and to Ravenna mosaic, brought into the twentieth century. Up close the surface reads as a craft object as much as a painting.
Sources: Byzantine icon, Japanese print, mosaic
Klimt visited Ravenna in 1903 and saw the gold-ground Byzantine mosaics. He absorbed Japanese woodblock prints through Vienna's collectors. The Kiss is built on this triple inheritance — the flatness and gold of Byzantine icon, the patterned cloaks borrowed from Heian-era Japanese textile painting, and the decorative density of late-nineteenth-century Symbolism.
Reading the symbolism: hard rectangles, soft circles
The most cited reading of The Kiss is that the patterns of the cloak code the figures by gender. The man's straight rectangles signal active, structured, geometric force. The woman's circles and ovals signal yielding, biomorphic, organic receptivity. Klimt may not have intended a literal allegory, but Viennese viewers in 1908 would have read the pattern language clearly. The painting is partly a meditation on how decoration can hold psychological content.
The flowers and the cliff edge
Look at the woman's feet. She is kneeling at the edge of a cliff — the patch of meadow ends abruptly, and beyond it is gold space. Some readers take this literally: the embrace is precarious, the moment of love balanced on the edge of a fall. Others read it formally: the cliff edge is just a compositional device for ending the foreground. The painting permits both readings.
How to hang The Kiss in a modern interior
The Kiss handles modern interiors better than almost any nineteenth-century painting. The gold reads against a matte black wall, against unpainted concrete, against linen-white. The painting wants warm metal in the frame — aged brass, oxidised gold, walnut — and breathing room. Hang it as a single anchor, ideally where the gold can catch lamp light. Do not group it. Do not put a busy print next to it.
Where to see the original
The Kiss lives at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. It has hung there since 1908. The room it is in is dim by design; the gold leaf needs low light to read properly. The Belvedere does not lend it.
Key takeaways
The Kiss was painted 1907–1908 in Vienna, during Klimt's golden phase.
Real gold leaf. The technique is a deliberate revival of Byzantine icon and Ravenna mosaic.
The patterns code the figures: rectangles for the man, circles for the woman.
The painting is built on a triple inheritance — Byzantine mosaic, Japanese woodblock, Symbolist decoration.
Hang it as a single anchor in warm-metal frame, where lamp light can catch the gold.
Featured prints from the Klimt archive
Browse the full archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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