The Gold in Klimt's The Kiss

The gold in The Kiss is real metal leaf — gold, with silver and platinum — laid onto the canvas, not gold-colored paint. Klimt was a gold engraver's son who had seen the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna in 1903, and he used a flat gold ground to do what those mosaics do: abolish space.

It is metal, not pigment

The Kiss is a square canvas, 180 by 180 centimetres — about 71 inches each way — painted in 1907 and 1908. Almost everything you think of as its color is not paint at all.

Gold leaf is gold hammered until it is roughly a tenth of a micrometre thick, thin enough that a sheet tears in a draft. It is laid onto a prepared, tacky ground, burnished, and worked over. Klimt used it alongside silver and platinum leaf, which is how the cloak carries so many metallic tones: the cool grays and whites in the man's robe are not gray paint standing in for metal, they are a different metal.

Oil paint is reserved for the parts that need to be alive — faces, hands, hair, the flowers under her feet. Some ornament is built up in low relief, so it catches raking light physically rather than by illusion.

This is why reproductions can only take you so far. A photograph fixes the metal at one brightness; in front of the canvas the cloak changes as you move. It is closer to goldsmith's work that happens to contain a painting than to a painting that happens to be gold.

Where the gold came from

Two facts explain the material better than any symbolism.

His father was a gold engraver. Ernst Klimt came to Vienna from Bohemia and worked in precious metals; Gustav's brother Georg became a metalworker. Klimt grew up around leaf and burnishers, and trained at Vienna's School of Applied Arts as a decorative painter. He was a craftsman first and never fully separated the two.

He went to Ravenna in 1903. In the church of San Vitale he saw the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics, including the panels of Justinian and Theodora, where figures stand against a solid gold field with no depth behind them at all. Klimt understood what the flatness was doing: with no space to recede into, figures stop being people in a room and become something closer to icons.

The result is the Golden Phase, roughly the decade from 1901. Judith I (1901) was the first of the great gold-leaf pictures; Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) took it as far as it could go. The Kiss, from the same moment, is where technique and subject finally fit: two people trying to dissolve into one another, in a medium that dissolves the space around them.

One cloak, two patterns

The couple share a single golden cloak, so their bodies read as one silhouette — and Klimt uses ornament, not outline, to tell you where one ends and the other begins.

The man's half is covered in hard-edged rectangles in black, white and gray. The woman's is circles, ovals and flower forms in warmer colors. The two vocabularies run right up against each other along the seam where the figures meet.

The standard reading is that the rectangles are masculine and the circles feminine, and it is reasonable — the contrast is too systematic to be accidental. But be clear about its status: Klimt never wrote down what the patterns meant. The masculine-feminine reading is an interpretation art historians arrived at, not something the artist confirmed.

What is not interpretation is the compositional job the patterns do. Without them the cloak would be an undifferentiated gold slab. With them you can read two bodies inside one shape — precisely the tension the painting is built on.

The couple are almost certainly not Klimt and Emilie Flöge

Search for this painting and you will be told, confidently, that it shows Klimt and Emilie Flöge, the Viennese fashion designer who was his companion for the last twenty-five years of his life. There is no evidence for that.

Klimt left no diaries, almost no letters about his work, and no statement identifying the models. He said he had never painted a self-portrait, and that anyone wanting to know about him should look at his pictures instead. The other names floated over the years — the model known as Red Hilde, or Alma Mahler — rest on the same absence of documentation. Klimt seems to have wanted it that way: the faces are barely individualised and his is turned almost entirely away.

There is a second, more interesting disagreement about the woman. Her eyes are closed, her head is tipped back and turned aside so he kisses her cheek rather than her mouth, and one hand is clenched around his. The flowering ground she kneels on stops at a sharp edge, and her feet curl over it.

For most of the twentieth century this was read as ecstasy. Later critics have read the same details as ambivalence or resistance — the turned face, the tension in the fingers, the precipice. Both are defensible from what is on the canvas; be skeptical of any account presenting either as settled.

25,000 crowns, and no price since

The Kiss was shown at the Kunstschau in Vienna in the summer of 1908, under the title Lovers, and it was still unfinished. The Austrian state bought it straight off the wall for the Moderne Galerie for 25,000 crowns — an extraordinary sum for a contemporary Austrian painting, and striking given that Klimt had spent the previous decade scandalising official Vienna.

It has been in the state collection ever since and hangs today at the Belvedere. It has never come to market, which is why the question how much is The Kiss worth has no real answer. The nearest comparisons are pictures that did move: Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold in 2006 for $135 million after a landmark restitution case, and Water Serpents II privately in 2013 for a reported $183 million. Any nine-figure estimate for The Kiss is a guess built on those.

Klimt died in February 1918, at fifty-five. The Golden Phase had already ended: by 1910 he had put the leaf away for the dense, high-color work of his late years. He made the surface everyone now associates with him for less than a decade.

Frequently asked questions

Is the gold in Klimt's The Kiss real gold?

Yes. It is real gold leaf — gold hammered to about a tenth of a micrometre and laid onto the prepared canvas — used together with silver and platinum leaf, which accounts for the cool grays and whites in the man's robe. Only the faces, hands, hair and flowers are painted in oil.

Why did Klimt use gold leaf?

His father was a gold engraver and his brother a metalworker, so he grew up with the material and trained as a decorative painter. And in 1903 he saw the Byzantine mosaics at San Vitale in Ravenna, where figures stand against solid gold with no depth behind them. Flat gold removes space, turning a portrait into something closer to an icon.

Who are the couple in The Kiss?

Nobody knows. The painting is often said to show Klimt and Emilie Flöge, his companion of twenty-five years, but there is no documentary evidence for that or for the other candidates suggested over the years. Klimt left almost no writing about his work, and the faces are deliberately barely individualised.

What do the patterns on the robes mean?

The man's half of the shared cloak is covered in hard rectangles in black, white and gray; the woman's is circles, ovals and flowers. The usual reading is masculine versus feminine, and the contrast is clearly deliberate, but Klimt never explained it. Compositionally, the patterns let you see two bodies inside one golden silhouette.

How big is The Kiss and where is it?

It is a square canvas, 180 by 180 centimetres or roughly 71 by 71 inches, and it hangs at the Belvedere in Vienna. The Austrian state bought it unfinished from the 1908 Kunstschau exhibition for 25,000 crowns and it has never been sold on the open market since.

What was Klimt's Golden Phase?

The decade from roughly 1901 when Klimt worked with gold, silver and platinum leaf on canvas. Judith I of 1901 was the first of the major gold pictures; Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and The Kiss are the high point. By 1910 he had largely abandoned metal leaf for his dense, high-color late work.

Klimt died in 1918 and his work is in the public domain, so the whole Golden Phase — The Kiss, the Adele Bloch-Bauer portraits, Judith, Danaë — can be printed at any size. Browse Gustav Klimt prints, the The Kiss collection, or more Art Nouveau work as framed prints or on canvas. A wide mat and a slim gold frame do more for the gold passages than any coating.