The Kiss shows a man and a woman fused into one golden shape, and the Belvedere in Vienna reads it as a perfect union of man and woman. Klimt began it in 1907 and gave the two bodies different patterns: rectangles for him, circles for her. He never explained any of it.
The museum bought the painting in 1908 and says the patterns stand for the two sexes. Everything else people say about it, who the couple is, what lies under their knees, what the kiss means, comes from viewers, because Klimt made no statement.
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A perfect union is the museum's word. Look at the kiss itself and the picture is less tidy. His lips do not reach her mouth. According to the Italian magazine Finestre sull'Arte, he kisses her cheek, while she keeps her eyes closed and her head tipped back. His face stays in profile. Hers is entirely visible.
The couple has no names either. The Belvedere says there is no evidence in any biographical source that Klimt wanted to paint himself and his partner, and yet that is the answer most people have heard.
A union where one face hides and the other gives way is stranger than its fame suggests. I read a surrender in it, but the museum's word is union, and a kiss on the cheek leaves room for both.
Who are the two lovers?
Nobody knows, and the man who painted them never said. Many viewers suspect a double portrait of Klimt and Emilie Flöge, his lifelong partner, who ran a fashion salon in Vienna with her sisters. The Belvedere answers that Klimt did not create portraits of himself in general, and that no biographical source shows he meant to paint the two of them here.
The paper trail between them is thin. On 30 December 1917, a few days before the stroke that began his last illness, Klimt wrote Flöge a last letter wishing her the happiest New Year ever. Over the years he sent her a myriad of picture postcards. Her replies have not survived.
Flöge did wear his designs. The Belvedere shows her in a dress Klimt designed in a photograph from 1909, and says she was at his side at official outings. That makes her a plausible guess and nothing more. Klimt left the couple anonymous, and he gave no more explanation for the meadow under them, which stops dead at the right edge.
What You'll Discover
What lies past the meadow's edge.
What the rectangles and circles are for.
Where Klimt drew this embrace first.
How the couple changed in Brussels.