A kiss is just a kiss, except perhaps when it comes to Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. It’s a lip-puckering phenomenon, endlessly reproduced on posters, cards, scarves, tote bags, umbrellas, laptop covers, iPhone cases and a £305 satin bra and knickers set by the lingerie brand La Musa. Mwah.
It is beyond price. The Kiss has been part of the collection of the Belvedere in Vienna since 1908, but when Klimt’s Lady with a Fan went under the hammer in June this year it became the most valuable work of art sold at auction in Europe at £85.3 million.
If I asked you to close your eyes and picture The Kiss, you would probably see a couple embracing, a field of gold, a scene from a dream. An image that you might have sent as a Valentine or anniversary card. A picture of sighing romance.
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Romantic? A new documentary asks us to look again at Klimt’s most iconic — and we’ll come back to that word — work. From the people who brought you Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition, a tour of the Rijksmuseum exhibition that broke UK box office records for an art film, comes Klimt & The Kiss. Released in cinemas today, the 90-minute film from the production company Exhibition on Screen shines a new light on Klimt’s swooning, sinister masterpiece. “You’re just bedazzled initially, you’re disorientated, you don’t quite understand what’s going on,” says Dr Sabine Wieber, senior lecturer in history of art and design at the University of Glasgow. “What I love about encountering the work is the time it demands from you to decipher it.”
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Klimt was born in 1862, the eldest son of a Viennese engraver, and brought up with his two brothers and four sisters on precious little money. He entered the Kunstgewerbeschule (art school) in Vienna in 1876 and graduated at a time of monumental Habsburg public patronage. From 1857 the old medieval city walls had been demolished to make way for the Ringstrasse, the grandest of city ring roads. With the Ringstrasse came new municipal buildings with expanses of walls and ceilings in need of decoration, and after art school Gustav and his brother Ernst contributed murals to the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. They are still largely in the style of the previous generation — grand, stagey and academic. Only the wide, heavy-lidded eyes of Klimt’s women give a sense of what was to come.
The Kiss was painted in 1907-08, but its beginnings go back another decade. In 1897 Klimt became a painter of the art nouveau movement, or Jugendstil — literally the style of youth. Out went ponderous history painting in perfect perspective, in came a decorative, floriated, allegorical style with floating forms and flat, trellis-like scenes. Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Secession, a breakaway band that established a temple to the arts named after themselves with a golden dome and the inscription above the doors: “To every age its art. To every art its freedom.”
Here, in 1902, Klimt painted his Beethoven Frieze, an imaginative illustration of the composer’s Ninth Symphony which culminated in an early essay for The Kiss. In a scene of paradise, accompanied by a choir, a couple embrace. They are the embodiment of the words from Ode to Joy: “Be embraced, Millions! This kiss to all the world!”
Is The Kiss, painted ten years later, a restatement of this fully orchestrated joy? Or might it, as one of the curators suggests in the film, be a scene from a myth: Dionysus springing upon the sleeping Ariadne on the island of Naxos and waking her with a kiss? The cultural historian Gavin Plumley sounds a more ominous note: “To me The Kiss is a bittersweet image. I see something that is actually just a little bit creepy.”
The man’s hands are tight against the woman’s throat. Her neck is cricked. In this flattest of pictures, the only depth comes from the man’s neck as it pushes out from the picture plane. The woman’s head is a pale disc, her face reduced to a reflection in a silver platter. Her feet are right at the edge of a field of flowers, her toes and heels already over the precipice. Is he pulling her close or pushing her back? Her body, for all its swirls and rings-of-Saturn spots, is as stiff as a board. Trails of creeper or daisy chain wrap around her ankles.
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The top edge of the painting comes down on them like the edge of a guillotine. The format of the painting is perfectly square — 180 x 180cm — but for the sake of rectangular posters the right side is usually cropped so that you lose both the abyss and the sense of the strangely cramped top of the picture. (Some online poster shops go so far as to photoshop a few more inches of golden ground so that the composition is more evenly framed. Naughty.)
What, in any case, did Klimt know of romance? The documentary shows him to have been ruthless in his dealings with women. His mother and sisters skivvied for him. He charmed — but what portraitist doesn’t? — his sitters, the wives and daughters of the Viennese haute bourgeoisie. He picked up female models on the street and drew them naked, in pairs, their limbs intimately intertwined. A dangerous game: homosexuality was illegal and Klimt from his earliest exhibitions had been accused of pornography. His studio had two doors — models in and out on the left, patrons on the right. After his death following a stroke in 1918, 14 children claimed the artist as their father.
For years he strung along the clever, resourceful Emilie Flöge, whom he met when she was 17 and he 29. She set up a fashion salon, selling “reform dress” — uncorseted clothes for the modern woman. He wrote her letters decorated with hearts struck with arrows and depended on her for intellectual companionship but insisted on absolute secrecy about their relationship. He did not marry her.
One of the most fascinating parts of the film deals with Klimt’s technique. Even if he is not your cup of Viennese coffee, his surfaces are dazzling. Take that tarnished cloth of gold background. A technical investigation undertaken by the Belvedere reveals the stages behind Klimt’s glittering, speckled effects. First, a layer of white primer, followed by a film of glue and shellac. Then, a glaze of dark brown oil-resin paint. While the paint was still wet, Klimt crushed and sprinkled gold, silver, platinum and brass flakes over the surface. Gold is only one part of the story — it’s the whole armoured mix that gives the surface its shimmer. Using a technique borrowed from Japanese screen painting, Klimt used bamboo poles to blow the fine metal leaves. He was fascinated by Byzantine icons and The Kiss really ought to be surrounded by lit candles, like an icon, in the gloom of a chapel.
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The Kiss, through reproduction, has become kitsch. But the more you look at the painting the more worrying it becomes, from the grave-like black blocks on the man’s mantle to the woman’s tense, rigor mortis toes. (Were feet ever less ecstatic?) The product merchants aren’t just guilty of cropping and pasting. A supermarket sweep of a Klimt gift shop in the final five minutes of the documentary shows The Kiss ceramic figurines in which the hands, necks and angles have been more gracefully arranged and the man’s face given a more Disney prince-like, less jutting and stubbled jaw. Soup up the romance, tone down the menace. As a soppy picture of a greeting-card smooch, The Kiss is diminished. Watch this documentary and a far darker picture appears.
Exhibition on Screen: Klimt & The Kiss is in cinemas
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