The gold in Klimt's The Kiss is not all gold, and nobody is kissing

Two surprises sit inside the most reproduced embrace in art. The first: the figures are gold, silver and platinum — and the background is brass.

The second: no kiss is taking place. He is bending toward her cheek; her eyes are closed; the moment is the instant before. As the Belvedere puts it in its own exhibition on the subject, Klimt concentrates on the charged moment as the two draw closer and “deliberately avoids representing the actual” kiss.

What the surface is actually made of

The museum’s materials line is unusually specific, and worth reading slowly:

Figures: gold leaf, silver leaf, platinum leaf, resin oil colours on primed canvas (zinc paint). — Background: composition gold (brass), glazed, flakes of metal leaf.

So the picture is stratified by value. The two bodies carry genuine precious metals — gold, silver and platinum, each behaving differently under light. Everything around them is Schlagmetall: brass, an imitation gold, glazed over and scattered with loose flakes of metal leaf.

That is not a shortcut. It is a decision about where the eye should be caught. Brass and gold age differently, catch light differently and sit at different depths — and Klimt used the cheap metal for the field and the real ones for the lovers.

It is also why this painting is close to impossible to photograph well, and why looking at a high-resolution file of it is a genuinely different experience from looking at a print. Metal leaf does not reproduce as colour; it reproduces as texture. At magnification you can see brass running over the edges of the figures’ contours, and the scattered flakes catching in the background like grit.

Why gold at all

Klimt’s father was a gold engraver, and this is his Golden Period — but the museum makes a plainer point about the picture’s origin: it was painted without a commission. Nobody ordered it. He made it, at the height of his powers, and then had to find it a home.

The composition strips out almost everything. A couple at the edge of a flower meadow, dissolved into a single gold form — and, the record notes, only the different patterning of their robes distinguishes their bodies. Rectangles for him, circles and ovals for her. Take the patterns away and there is one shape.

Reading. The rectangles-and-circles division is often read as a statement about masculine and feminine principles, and it may well be. What the museum states is narrower: that the patterning is the only thing separating the two bodies. The meaning assigned to those shapes is interpretation, and Klimt left no explanation.

He missed his own deadline

The painting was first shown as Liebespaar — Lovers, not The Kiss — at the Kunstschau Wien of 1908, the vast exhibition Klimt and Josef Hoffmann threw together in record time, open from 1st June to 15th November.

And he did not finish it in time for the opening. The most famous painting in Austria went up late, in a show its own painter was organising.

It was bought straight out of that period, in 1908/09, by the Ministry for Culture and Education for the Moderne Galerie — the state acquiring a picture of two lovers at a moment when Klimt’s work was still routinely called obscene. It has been in the public collection ever since, and hangs at the Upper Belvedere.

What isn’t known

• Who they are. The record names no models. The popular identification of Klimt and Emilie Flöge is not in the museum’s account.
• Exactly when it was painted. The Belvedere dates it c. 1907–1909 — a two-year spread for a picture usually labelled 1908.
• What the patterns mean. Described, not decoded.
• Why he chose brass for the ground. The materials are recorded; the reasoning is not.

The thing to take from it is how deliberate the whole surface is. A painter raised around gold engraving spent two years building a picture in four metals, put the expensive ones only on the bodies, painted the moment before a kiss rather than the kiss, and left it just ambiguous enough that everyone since has filled in the rest.

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