The Kiss Silk Scarf

Klimt painted The Kiss during his so-called "Golden Period," when he was incorporating actual gold and silver leaf into his canvases in homage to the Byzantine mosaics and medieval manuscript illuminations that had captivated him on a trip to Ravenna in 1903. The result, completed for the 1908 Kunstschau Vienna exhibition, was immediately recognised as a masterpiece. The Austrian government purchased it before the show even closed, paying the enormous sum of 25,000 crowns, and it has never left Vienna since. The painting shows a couple locked in an embrace at the edge of a flower-strewn cliff, their bodies engulfed in a golden robe decorated with geometric patterns — rectangles on his, circular florals on hers. Their faces are turned away or hidden, reducing them to pure sensation: this is not a portrait of two specific people but of the universal act of tenderness itself. The gold that surrounds them functions as both a decorative device and a spiritual halo, elevating a private moment into something sacred. There is no world beyond this embrace. Klimt may have painted himself and his long-term companion Emilie Flöge — they never married but were inseparable for twenty-seven years. Or he may have painted something more archetypal: the union of masculine and feminine principles, the dissolution of individual identity in love. The deliberate ambiguity is characteristic. The Kiss resists biography and invites myth, which is why it has been reproduced more often than almost any other painting in art history and why it continues to feel, each time you stand before it, like an image you have carried inside yourself all along.

Gustav Klimt, 1907–1908