The Shape of The Kiss

Lessons in love & art from Gustav Klimt

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The first time Giulio visited my apartment it was snowing. We had come in off the street, pink-cheeked and frosted and slightly giddy. As we shed our layers and shook off the ice, he chuckled, pointing at my gallery wall. The Kiss, he said, I have the same one in my room. It’s the only art in the place.

I looked to him and then to the wall, feeling the angle of our shared gaze align and cast itself over the painting. That’s funny, I said, maybe it’s a sign. The corner of his mouth twitched into a smirk.
Maybe.

The painting would become somewhat of a motif in our relationship; the subject of various gifts and shared moments of recognition when we encountered it out in the world. So too, the work had been for my parents. Recently, I unearthed an old postcard my father had sent to my mother when they were dating. “Thank you for lying so close to me in sleep. A kiss on your forehead,” he wrote. In the corner, the postcard’s information: Verlag Galerie Welz Austria, on the front side: Klimt’s Kiss.

I can’t say I know the details of what the painting did or did not mean to my parents, but for me, it’s become a work of active, shifting significance; a representation of the way love deepens and changes over time.

The Kiss is indisputably Klimt’s most famous painting, first unveiled to the public in 1908 and purchased immediately thereafter by the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. It is there that the painting remains today, having become a great source of pride to both the museum and the greater country of Austria. For art historians around the world, The Kiss is uniquely reflective of Klimt’s artistic genius, and a defining example of his famed “golden era”, in which he worked predominantly with gold leaf, said to have been inspired by his father’s occupation as a goldsmith.

Klimt’s “golden era” coincided with a period in Vienna’s history later given the same title. The late 19th to early 20th century saw the city undergo a shift from classic, traditional values and aesthetics to more modern sensibilities. It was a time of dynamic political, economic, and artistic expression, in which old norms were challenged and the status quo seemed to break open at the seams; revealing within it a multitude of new possibilities. Klimt’s golden paintings were well suited to this era, exemplifying a sense of opulent disobedience; the bold entrance into a new world of decadence and opportunity. A redefinition of wealth.

In another note my father wrote to my mother, he jokes at the end, “and to think, we’re rich!”. My parents were far from rich– especially at that period in their lives – so I can only imagine that he meant, among other things, rich in love.

As it turned out, Giulio would return to my apartment many times after that first snowy visit. Often, he would sit at the corner of the couch, just beneath the painting. We’d chat and argue and ponder and make out for long hours at a time as evening curdled into night and infatuation unfurled into something else.

Once, as I awoke from a Sunday afternoon nap in the roundness of his embrace, I thought perhaps I finally understood Klimt’s idea of wealth. The air above us was lukewarm and heavy as water. Outside, the sounds of the city arranged themselves into miniature symphonies. As I looked down at the shapes of our bodies folded against one another– at the way the quilt rippled in small arcs like the curve of a flower petal– I felt I’d finally emerged into Klimt’s world.

In that world, colors tossed themselves gleefully across my vision. They scattered like leaves on the wind, collected in pools of affection. Here, the gentle arc of his eyelid, there, the sharp corner of his elbow. When I looked at Giulio’s face in this new world, I found the answers to questions I didn’t know I had.

The shape surrounding Klimt’s lovers is often likened to a womb. It is read by some as a symbol of creation, of the systems and circles of life. Like Klimt’s couple, love had seen my world reborn– reinvented and enlivened in the context of things I didn’t know it was possible to feel.

At some point though, the painting began to change. When, exactly, I cannot say. Perhaps it wasn’t a specific moment. Perhaps it happened slowly, imperceptibly, like the wearing away of a cliff. A rock trickles downwards– the color of the flowers dims. The red of the woman’s cheek becomes a worried flush. Her placid expression belies apathy rather than affection.

Loving Giulio had exposed me to new opportunities for loss. Every day became an act of vulnerability. I fretted over the ways we seemed sometimes misaligned. Over how near the possibility of an ending could appear unexpectedly. Where I’d heard to expect that people in love “fit together like a puzzle”, we felt more like chess pieces; constantly jockeying among one another for position, the stakes of the game higher with every move.

I had not realized, as I so clearly did then, that the makeup of Klimt’s figures is inherently incongruous. Despite their close embrace, they remain unflinchingly distinct. Their points of contact quiver with incompatibility. Where his body is filled with monochromatic rectangles (said to be inspired by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony score), her’s is doused in flowers. He is manufactured, and she is natural. At times, she appears almost part of the floral world that is gestured to around her; reeds rising up her body as if pulling her into the earth. This particular interpretation is consistent with speculation among scholars that “the Kiss” is an allusion to the myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid's "Metamorphoses”, in which Daphne transforms into a Laurel tree to evade Apollo's advances. The end of the myth specifically mentions "a kiss" that occurs amidst or after her transformation.

Had a tree been an option for me during this period of fear, perhaps I would have taken it.

True art, however, like love, is never stagnant. It shifts and develops with the eye and perspective of the viewer. It took me a while to understand that likeness– sameness– is not always desirable. Humans seek out novelty. There is a reason we travel away from our normal lives to find beauty and inspiration. A reason why surprises are more special than routine.

I’ve come to realize that it is the incongruousness of Klimt’s figures that makes the painting beautiful. The viewer's eye is cast across the frame at acute angles of interest; it bounds forth from the corner of the man’s rectangles and slides swiftly along the woman’s curves. The proximity of their differences is thrilling; one wonders at the textures of their skin- how it feels when their antithetical makeups press against one another.

Like Guilio and me, Klimt’s figures could never really be one (though we feel close to it at times). They pull at the twine of each other’s fabric; weave a new pattern out of distinct halves. They complement rather than complete. Differences are not, inherently, incompatibilities. They are assertions of individual halves; of characters that meet, somewhere, in the imperceptible middle between their disparate selves.

Perhaps The Kiss has remained such a collectively beloved work across the world because of its multitudes. The piece takes hold in our imaginations not because it is beautiful but because it is dynamic, imperfect, and ever-changing. It shimmers with bliss around the edges and contains abundance within.

In Giulo’s apartment now, there is no Klimt painting. In his bedroom, the walls are filled with a variety of black--and–white prints in high contrast frames. When I awake there in his embrace, I look at their shapes staggering up towards the ceiling, and I still find The Kiss. There is Klimt’s man; his world characterized by and framed in cubes of monochromaticity. In the music of disharmony. I have lost myself amidst their patterning many times and undoubtedly, I will again.

The truth of art is realized only in the pigments of the present; in the warm auburn of Giulio’s face, the deep black of his hair. The way the afternoon sun alights in gold against his skin. That is more beautiful than Klimt could ever have known.