The Kiss is famous because it stopped people the moment it was shown, and the state took it into a museum before the show was over. Klimt covered a square canvas, about 1.8 meters wide, with real gold leaf and painted two lovers in it. The Austrian Ministry of Education bought it for 25,000 crowns in 1908, while the exhibition was still open. It has belonged to the museum now called the Belvedere ever since.
Klimt showed 16 paintings at the Kunstschau in Vienna, and this was one of the two highlights, next to The Three Ages of Woman. The Belvedere's own account says it "caused a great stir and fascinated the visitors."
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Nobody in Vienna that summer saw a painting called The Kiss.
The Kunstschau catalogue listed it as Liebespaar, German for Lovers. The name the whole world uses came later, and it did not come from that catalogue.
Even the picture is not quite the one people saw in June 1908. The Belvedere dates it 1908 to 1909, and says Klimt made changes to it after the exhibition. The painting hanging in Vienna today is a reworked version of the one the state paid for.
By the time it arrived, the state had owned the painting for three years. I take that as the best proof of how strong the picture was: it did not need its famous name to become famous.
Why did the state buy a painting that was not finished?
Because the purchase happened at the show itself. The Kunstschau opened on 1 June 1908 and ran until 16 November. During those months the Ministry of Education paid 25,000 crowns for the picture, although, in the Belvedere's words, it was "clearly unfinished." It went to the Moderne Galerie, a state museum that had opened five years earlier in the Lower Belvedere.
The show itself was an act of defiance. The wooden exhibition grounds were built to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph's reign, yet the artists were not invited to the official celebrations, according to Tate. At the opening, Klimt called the Kunstschau "a show of force of Austrian ambitions in art."
Klimt had been fighting Vienna's official taste since he helped found the Secession in 1897. Now the state he had fought was paying him a large sum for a picture he had not finished. Gustav Klimt kept working on it.
What You'll Discover
What Klimt changed after the sale.
Where the gold came from.
Where the name The Kiss began.