Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, 1907-1908
Love, intimacy, passion – Gustav Klimt’s iconic masterpiece The Kiss seems to embody these universal themes. But look closer, and the picture becomes more complicated. Is this a romantic embrace, an erotic encounter, or something else entirely?
Completed between 1907-1908, the painting shows a couple locked in an embrace, the man bending over to press a kiss to the woman’s cheek as she kneels before him. Their bodies are entwined, yet their faces are obscured – his turning away from the viewer, hers upturned but eyes firmly shut. Already, Klimt introduces a note of ambiguity.
The gold-leafed, highly-stylized rectangular patterns adorning the man’s robe have been read as symbols of masculine virility. By contrast, the woman is wrapped in softer, rounded floral forms, suggesting femininity and perhaps fecundity. The phallic connotations of the couple’s triangular form are hard to ignore. Is Klimt hinting at a sexual union?
And yet, the Kiss – for all its sensuality – stops short of explicit eroticism. The figures appear almost chaste, their faces and hands the only flesh on display. Is this tender affection rather than carnal passion? Klimt was known for his frank depictions of sexuality, but here he is more restrained, even reverential.
The identities of the models provide another clue. Many believe the painting depicts Klimt and his long-time companion Emilie Flöge. Yet theirs was an unconventional relationship, more intellectual than physical. Is the woman’s face turned away in rejection of the man’s advance? A sign that love – like the couple’s precarious cliffside perch – is uncertain and fraught with danger?
Others see mythological parallels, particularly to Apollo and Daphne. Is the woman’s legs, seemingly merged with the flora, a sign of her metamorphosing into a laurel tree to escape the man’s grasp? Klimt leaves the narrative tantalizingly open to interpretation.
In the end, perhaps the kiss itself is a red herring. For all its romantic golden grandeur, the painting’s true subject may be the impossibility of uniting two separate beings as one. Like the flat patterning that subsumes the figures, erasing their individuality, Klimt suggests the futility of seeking spiritual communion in the physical realm.
Love, The Kiss tells us, is a beautiful dream, but only a dream. We are ultimately alone together, separated by the patterns that make us who we are. In this light, the painting becomes a melancholy meditation on the human condition, a shimmering monument to loves imagined but never truly attained.
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