Gustav Klimt did not call it The Kiss at first. When he showed it in Vienna in 1908, the painting went by the simpler name Lovers, and the title the world uses today came afterward. The Austrian state bought it straight from the exhibition, before the paint was hardly dry, and it has hung in the Belvedere ever since.
The glow comes from real gold. Klimt applied gold leaf to the canvas, a technique he drew from the Byzantine mosaics he had seen in Ravenna in 1903. Look closely and the picture is actually two kinds of pattern. The man's robe is built from stiff black and white rectangles. The woman's dress is a swirl of circles, spirals and flowers. Pattern stands in for the difference between them, hard-edged against soft.
The pair stand on a meadow of tiny flowers, and the woman's feet curl over the edge. Some viewers see danger in that, a cliff beside the bliss. Others see how little the couple care. Notice, too, that he kisses her cheek, and her face is turned away, eyes closed, hands crossed against his neck. Whether she is surrendering or holding him off is hard to say.
Nobody can say for sure who they are. A popular guess is that they are Klimt himself and Emilie Flöge, the fashion designer who was his lifelong companion, but there is no firm evidence. Klimt made a point of keeping his private life private, and he left no explanation.
He painted it as a member of the Vienna Secession, the group of artists who broke with the official art establishment, and it remains the best known work of the movement. It is also one of the most reproduced images of love ever made.
Klimt's The Kiss appears on our: