Not Paint, but Metal
The Kiss — *Der Kuss* in German — is an oil-on-canvas painting with added gold leaf, silver and platinum, by the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. It was made at some point across 1907 and 1908.
The materials are the point. This is not a picture of gold; there is actual precious metal on the surface, which is why the painting behaves differently as you move in front of it. Paint absorbs light. Gold leaf throws it back.
It is a perfect square: 180 cm × 180 cm. The composition shows a couple embracing, their bodies entwined in elaborate robes decorated in a manner influenced by contemporary Art Nouveau and by the organic forms of the earlier Arts and Crafts movement. The woman kneels at the edge of a patch of flowery meadow with her feet exposed; the man's face is hidden as he kisses her cheek.
A Childhood Spent Around Gold
Klimt's use of gold was not a stylistic affectation picked up late. His father was a travelling artisan specialising in gold engravings — the material was part of the household trade before it was ever part of the art.
The second source was a journey. On a 1903 trip to Ravenna in Italy, Klimt encountered the Byzantine mosaics at the Church of San Vitale, where flat planes of shimmering gold surround stylised human figures.
Put those together and the painting's logic becomes clear. The flattened, patterned robes and the glowing background are doing what Byzantine mosaic does: refusing depth, treating the figures as icons set into ornament. The period this belongs to is known as Klimt's Golden Period, and *The Kiss* is generally considered its height.
Sold Before It Was Done
The painting was exhibited in 1908 at Vienna's Kunstschau, under the title *Liebespaar* — "the lovers" — as recorded in the exhibition catalogue.
What happened next was unusual, and it mattered. Unlike Klimt's earlier ceiling series, which had been genuinely controversial, this work was enthusiastically received — and was purchased by the Austrian government while still unfinished.
A state buying an incomplete painting straight off the wall is not normal behaviour. It signals a public reversal: an artist who had recently been a scandal became, with one canvas, a national asset. The purchase is also why the work stayed in Austria rather than dispersing into private hands, which is the reason anyone can still walk in and see it today.
Vienna's Most Famous Square
*The Kiss* now hangs in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, in the Upper Belvedere Palace in Vienna.
It is considered a masterpiece of the Vienna Secession — the local variation of Art Nouveau, formed by artists who broke away from the conservative Viennese establishment — and probably Klimt's most important work.
What keeps it famous is arguably the tension inside it. The ornament is overwhelming, geometric and abstract, the robes dissolving into rectangles and spirals until the couple almost disappears into pattern. And yet the small human details survive it: a hand cupping a jaw, bare feet curling at the edge of the flowers, a face turned away. Enormous decorative machinery deployed around a gesture anyone recognises immediately.
