Klimt's The Kiss: The Gold-Leaf Painting at the Centre of the Vienna Secession
Updated: Aug 31
Gustav Klimt's The Kiss — oil and gold leaf on canvas, one hundred and eighty centimetres square, painted between the autumn of 1907 and the summer of 1908 in his Josefstadt studio in Vienna — is the central picture of his Golden Phase and one of the most reproduced images in the entire history of European painting. The picture shows a kneeling man and woman in an embrace, the man bending down over the woman with his arms wrapped around her head, the woman tilted upward to meet him, her face turned toward the viewer in an expression of closed-eyed receptivity, the two figures fused into a single golden silhouette against an undifferentiated dark gold ground. The background is flat. There is no setting. There is no architectural context, no landscape, no room. The two figures, the patch of flowery meadow at their feet, and the dense golden field around them are the entire pictorial fact. The picture exists, in the most literal possible sense, in gold.
The Vienna Secession: ten years of an argument
The picture has to be understood as the culmination of a decade-long argument about what modern painting in Central Europe was supposed to do. The Vienna Secession was founded in 1897 by Klimt and a group of about forty Austrian painters, sculptors, architects, and designers who had broken away from the conservative Künstlerhaus, the established artists' association of Vienna. The Secession's founding motto, inscribed above the entrance of the building designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich on the Karlsplatz in 1898, was Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit — "To the age its art, to art its freedom." The argument was that historicist nineteenth-century academic painting was over, that modern art needed a visual language that could absorb the new currents reaching Vienna from Paris (Impressionism, Symbolism), from London (the Pre-Raphaelites, Aestheticism, Whistler), and from the rediscovered Byzantine and medieval sources that were being reconsidered across Europe in the 1890s.
Klimt was the Secession's first president and its most visible painter. He had spent the 1880s and early 1890s making decorative ceiling and wall paintings for grand Viennese public buildings — the Burgtheater, the Kunsthistorisches Museum — in a polished academic style that owed everything to the late nineteenth-century historicists. The break came around 1897-1900. From 1898 onward Klimt's paintings began to flatten, to incorporate stylised symbolic elements, to use gold leaf and other applied materials as part of the surface rather than as illusionistic suggestions of metal. The 1902 Beethoven Frieze, produced for the fourteenth Secession exhibition, is the picture where this mixed-medium ornamental language is first fully established: flat figures against a flat gold and silver ground, semi-precious stones and small metal squares applied to the plaster surface, the entire image read as decoration and as narrative simultaneously.
The Golden Phase: 1906-1909
The Golden Phase proper begins in 1906 and ends in 1909. The trigger was Klimt's trip to Ravenna in 1903, where he had spent several days studying the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale — the great wall mosaics of the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora and their courts, flat figures against shimmering gold-tesserae backgrounds, every surface organised as ornament. Klimt's 1907-08 paintings translate the Ravenna mosaics into oil paint and gold leaf on canvas. The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) — commissioned by the Vienna sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer as a portrait of his wife — is the picture in which the Byzantine vocabulary is most explicitly applied to a Vienna society portrait: Adele's face and hands are painted in conventional flesh tones, but her dress and the entire background dissolve into a flat field of gold leaf, silver leaf, and small black-and-white geometric motifs.
The Adele I portrait is sometimes called the "Austrian Mona Lisa" — a label that catches its national-iconic status without quite explaining what makes it a Golden Phase rather than a normal-society portrait. The Bloch-Bauers were Klimt's most important patrons of these years; Klimt painted Adele twice, the second time in 1912 in a much less gold-heavy register. The 1907 picture was the breakthrough work. It established that Klimt could take the Vienna upper-class portrait commission — a genre that had defined polite portraiture in Central Europe since Vermeer — and reformat it into a mixed-medium gold-leaf ornament. Everything else in the Golden Phase, including The Kiss, proceeds from this 1907 picture.
The two figures: identity, embrace, surface
The identity of the two figures in The Kiss has been debated since the picture was first exhibited at the Vienna Kunstschau in 1908. The most persistent identification, never confirmed but circumstantially strong, is that the woman is Emilie Flöge (1874-1952), Klimt's long-term companion of the last twenty-seven years of his life. Klimt and Emilie's relationship was not formally a marriage but was unmistakably the central romantic relationship of his adult life; they spent every summer together at the Attersee in Upper Austria, they corresponded almost daily when apart, and Emilie was named as a primary heir in Klimt's will when he died in 1918. Klimt also fathered at least fourteen children (the documented count) by several other women, most of whom appear nowhere in his painted work — but Emilie is present, in different forms, throughout his Golden Phase. Whether she is literally the model for the woman in The Kiss is unanswerable; what is in no dispute is that the picture is the central symbolic record of Klimt's lifelong relationship with her.
The pose itself is doing something specific. The man is shown from behind and slightly to the side, his head bent down so that he is kissing the woman on the cheek rather than the mouth; her face is turned upward toward him with her eyes closed and her hand resting against his cheek. The body composition is wrapped — the man's arms enclose the woman's head completely, the woman's arms reach up to meet his neck, the two silhouettes fuse into a single rounded shape that contains them both. The clothing patterns reinforce this distinction: the man's robe is built of hard rectangular black-and-white blocks (masculine geometry), the woman's dress is built of soft circular and oval motifs in red and blue and gold (feminine pattern). The two pattern systems meet at the joined silhouette and fuse into a single golden cylindrical body. The picture is a visual argument about union: two distinct geometric systems collapsing into one shared surface.
Gold leaf: technique and meaning
The gold in The Kiss is not painted in the trompe-l'oeil convention of European painting since the late medieval period — there is no attempt to suggest, through tonal modelling, that the figures are wearing or are surrounded by actual metallic objects. The gold is real applied gold leaf, hammered to extreme thinness (about 0.1 microns) and pressed directly onto the canvas surface over an oil-based mordant. Klimt was using a technique that had been standard in Byzantine, medieval European, and Italian Trecento icon painting (the Sienese and Florentine altarpieces of Duccio, Giotto, Simone Martini) but that had been almost entirely abandoned by European oil painting after the early fifteenth-century shift to naturalistic illusion. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, had been a gold engraver in Vienna — Klimt grew up watching his father work with gold leaf and had practical knowledge of the material from childhood. The decision to bring gold leaf back into a 1907-08 oil painting was, in a strict art-historical sense, a deliberate reversion to a pre-Renaissance visual technology.
The gold also performs an iconographic function the picture inherits from Byzantine and medieval painting. In Byzantine mosaic and Italian Trecento panel painting, a gold ground signified the eternal heavenly realm — the figures were depicted not in a specific earthly setting but in the timeless space of divine grace. By placing his kissing couple against an undifferentiated gold background, Klimt is borrowing this iconographic language: the embrace is being placed outside time, outside ordinary domestic space, into the same eternal-symbolic realm that Byzantine saints and Italian Trecento Madonnas had occupied. The picture is, in this sense, a secular icon — a devotional image of romantic love that uses the visual technology of religious painting to do what religious painting had once done. It is also, by 1908 Viennese standards, a quietly radical statement about the spiritual value of erotic union: the embrace gets the same heavenly gold treatment that the Pantocrator had been getting in Ravenna for fourteen hundred years.
Stoclet Frieze: gold leaf into architecture
In the same months that The Kiss was being painted, Klimt was also working on the cartoons for the Stoclet Frieze — a series of nine large panels designed to be executed in mosaic and applied metals for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet, a Vienna-designed private mansion in Brussels commissioned by the Belgian industrialist Adolphe Stoclet from the Vienna Secession architect Josef Hoffmann in 1905 and completed in 1911. The cartoons were finished by 1909 and translated by the Wiener Werkstätte craftsmen into actual mosaic for the dining-room walls. The frieze includes a Tree of Life panel — a stylised spiralling tree built of small geometric gold-leaf motifs against a flat background — and an Expectation panel and a Fulfilment panel, the latter showing a kissing couple in an embrace structurally very similar to The Kiss but executed in actual mosaic at architectural scale.
The Stoclet project — completed roughly concurrently with The Kiss — is the high point of the Vienna Secession's Gesamtkunstwerk ambition. The mansion's architecture (Hoffmann), interior design (the Wiener Werkstätte craft-workshop founded by Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903), and wall decoration (Klimt's frieze) were conceived as a single integrated total work of art. Klimt's gold-leaf vocabulary in The Kiss should be read in this context: it was not just a single painter's stylistic invention but the visual idiom of a coordinated Vienna-Brussels architectural project whose ambition was to integrate painting, ornament, architecture, and craft into a single visual environment.
Reception and afterlife
The Kiss was first exhibited at the 1908 Kunstschau Wien — a large multi-artist exhibition of contemporary Austrian art organised by Klimt and his circle in a temporary purpose-built pavilion in the Vienna Inner City — and was purchased almost immediately by the Austrian state for the Modern Gallery (now the Belvedere). The acquisition price was twenty-five thousand crowns, a substantial sum at the time and one of the highest the Austrian state had ever paid for a single living-artist contemporary picture. The picture's reception was almost unanimously positive in Vienna, though there was the usual controversy about Klimt's erotic-decorative content in the conservative Catholic press. Outside Vienna the picture had relatively little immediate impact — Klimt's work was not widely exhibited internationally during his lifetime, and the Golden Phase pictures in particular were associated specifically with Vienna's local Secession context.
The picture's emergence as a global icon happened in the second half of the twentieth century. The combination of three things — the rediscovery of fin-de-siècle Vienna by post-1968 cultural historians (Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna was published in 1979 and became a foundational text), the explosion of the printed-poster art-reproduction market in the 1970s and 1980s, and the picture's intrinsic visual force on a cheap print — turned The Kiss into one of the most commercially reproduced images in the history of European painting. By the 1990s it was probably second only to the Mona Lisa in poster-shop ubiquity. The picture today is the centrepiece of the Belvedere's permanent collection and one of the most-visited single paintings in Central Europe — a Byzantine-revival meditation on union, made by a Vienna Secession painter in 1907-08, that has become the modern world's default visual symbol of romantic embrace.
Key takeaways
Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, oil and gold leaf on canvas (180 × 180 cm), was painted between autumn 1907 and summer 1908 in his Josefstadt studio in Vienna. It is the central picture of his Golden Phase (1906-09) and one of the most reproduced images in the history of European painting.
The picture is the culmination of a decade-long argument: the Vienna Secession had been founded in 1897 to break away from conservative academic painting in favour of a modern visual language that absorbed Impressionism, Symbolism, Aestheticism, and rediscovered Byzantine and medieval sources.
Klimt's Golden Phase was triggered by his 1903 trip to Ravenna, where he studied the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics of San Vitale. The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) was the breakthrough work that translated the Ravenna vocabulary into Vienna society portraiture.
The identity of the woman in The Kiss is most persistently identified as Emilie Flöge, Klimt's long-term companion of twenty-seven years. The pose — wrapped arms, fused silhouettes, the man's geometric robe meeting the woman's circular dress — is a visual argument about union: two distinct pattern systems collapsing into one shared surface.
The gold is real applied gold leaf, pressed directly onto the canvas — a technique abandoned by European oil painting after the early fifteenth century but standard in Byzantine, medieval European, and Italian Trecento icon painting. Klimt's father had been a gold engraver in Vienna; Klimt grew up watching gold-leaf work and brought it deliberately back into a modern oil painting.
The gold ground inherits its iconographic function from Byzantine mosaic: a heavenly timeless space outside ordinary earthly setting. By placing his embrace in this space, Klimt makes The Kiss a secular icon — a devotional image of romantic love using the visual technology of religious painting.
The picture was painted concurrently with the cartoons for the Stoclet Frieze (1905-11), Klimt's most ambitious architectural commission — a mosaic dining-room frieze for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels that includes a Tree of Life panel and an Embrace panel structurally very similar to The Kiss.
Purchased immediately by the Austrian state for twenty-five thousand crowns from the 1908 Kunstschau Wien exhibition, the picture became a global icon in the second half of the twentieth century — driven by the rediscovery of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the rise of the reproduction-poster market, and the picture's intrinsic visual force. Today it hangs in the Belvedere collection in Vienna.
Browse Klimt, Vienna Secession, and gold-leaf prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
New in the Journal: Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I: The 1907 Gold Portrait Stolen by the Nazis and Returned to a Niece in 2006
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