I first saw “The Kiss” through the Julia Roberts movie “Dying Young. 1” Not very flattering considering how the movie flopped by Hollywood standards. Nevertheless, proper credit needs mentioning for the film which introduced me to the opulent paintings of Gustav Klimt.
“The Kiss” is flooded with symbolism to the brim. My following attempt in formal analysis of the painting is by no means exhaustive.
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (Lovers), 1907-1908, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 5′ 11″ X 5′ 11″
Shape: A perfect square canvas is used as support. Klimt began his career as an architecture decoration painter. Using a square canvas may be his symbolic attempt in piggybacking on the architectural concept of squaring the circle.
Architecturally, the “square has been a symbol of our formed and conscious self in contrast with the circle as symbol of our nature and unconscious instinctive self. The mathematical problem of how to determine the side of a square so that its surface area equals that of a given circle has been problem that with pure geometrical means could not be solved. It acquired a symbolic meaning way beyond the pure mathematical import. Karl Jung and his followers have written about the symbolic aspects. 2 To find the square of the circle is to reach full consciousness. In architectural terms it may mean to design a place of such a level of perfection that it has the completeness of the natural world. It means to make our designed world of conscious decisions coincide with the natural world of our instinct and feelings. To realize the square of the circle is to become whole the ideal man. 3”
By choosing a square canvas, Klimt implicitly makes the centralized couple the circle, the symbol of our natural instinct to fall in love, to find our complimentary partner to make whole each other’s individuality.
A known artist of the eros, Klimt also purposefully shaped the couple’s embracing pose, with the golden aura engulfing them, into a suggestive phallic form. 4
Line/Edge: Clear compartmentalization of areas with explicit line work only occurs around the exposed body areas of the couple, separating the female (with light thin lines) and male figures (with dark bold lines) as individuals. The absence of clear line work between the couple’s interacting cloak area however unites them as a singular mass. Implied lines dominate the work through contrasting textures and color usage that result in value differentiation.
Value: The couple are thrown into the spot light at the middle of the canvas with generous usage of light valued gold leafs on the lovers’ garments and the curvaceous aura engulfing the couple with a background painted in dark bronze tone. “Klimt had visited Ravenna in 1903, where he had greatly admired the famous Byzantine mosaics.” 5 His father was a goldsmith and engraver, which could further explain Klimt’s propensity to use gold leaf as a bright value medium to draw viewers’ attention to his subject matter.
Color: The work is predominantly in warm shades of bronze brown (with a tint of cool green in the background), gold (for the couple) with the exception of the field of flowers the couple are perched on (in cool green with interspersed shades of pink flowers). Colors are laid with primary concern of decorating the canvas with opulent symbolic textural and pattern motifs which panders the fin-de-siècle spirit of Vienna of that period.
Texture/Pattern: A concerted barrage of flat patterns interplay to delineate areas of the canvas into the feminine (colorful ellipse clusters) against the masculine (black and white stoic rectangular blocks) figures caught in a unifying kissing embrace. It is interesting to note how the domineering rectangle and vertical masculine texture subtly invades the feminine form through underlying vertical wavy garment lines and a dash of square motifs wrapping the female arm, while the masculine form is subtly invaded with wave spirals cutting across his tunic in a horizontal manner.
Space: Spatial flatness through the usage of two-dimensional patterns and gold leaf painting techniques were deliberately employed except at the couple’s exposed flesh. During his “Golden Phase,” Klimt was heavily influenced by the art of Japan, ancient Egypt, and Byzantine Ravenna, where flat, two-dimensional perspective styles were preferred to emphasize human subject matter. 6
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