The Kiss

Klimt made this in Vienna around 1907, at the height of what people call his golden period, and the gold is not a figure of speech. He laid real gold leaf onto the canvas, a technique he had grown up around, since his father was a gold engraver, and which he had studied in the glittering Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna in Italy. A couple kneels at the edge of a flowering meadow, wrapped together in a single golden cloak, the man bending to kiss the woman's cheek. Look at the patterns on their robes and they quietly differ, hard black-and-white rectangles on his side, soft coloured circles and flowers on hers, two people distinct even as the gold fuses them into one shape. This was Vienna at a confident, decorative, slightly decadent peak, and Klimt was its most fashionable painter, part of the Secession, the group of artists who had broken from the old academy a decade earlier. The Austrian state bought the picture before he had even finished it. Notice the woman's feet, curled over the very edge of the flowered ground, as if the meadow simply stops there.