The Kiss is Gustav Klimt's painting of two lovers kneeling on a flowered meadow, wrapped in a single gold robe. He painted it in 1907 and 1908, reworked it before delivering it in the summer of 1909, and it hangs today in the Belvedere in Vienna.
The Austrian state bought it in 1908 for 25,000 crowns, while the painting was still on show and still unfinished. The Belvedere calls it probably the most popular work Klimt ever made.
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Klimt never called it The Kiss. When the painting went on show at the Vienna Kunstschau in 1908, in a hall of sixteen Klimt canvases, the catalogue listed it as Lovers.
A title decides what a viewer looks for. Lovers promises two people. A kiss promises a gesture, and the gesture is exactly what the picture holds back: the man's face is almost entirely hidden, and the woman's eyes are closed, so that nobody in the painting is looking at anybody.
The name everyone uses today turned up later, and not in Vienna.
Who first called it The Kiss?
The 1908 Kunstschau was Vienna's answer to official art…
What You'll Discover
When it was really finished.
What waits under her toes.
What the rectangles and circles mean.
Who the woman might be.
What the gold is made of.