Monday, January 10, 2011

Klimt The Kiss Painting Analysis

According to the world art history, The Kiss is probably Gustav Klimt's most famous painting of his so-called 'Golden Period' (1898 - 1908) when most of his masterpiece artworks utilized gold leaf. Klimt start The Kiss on 1907 when he was 45 and still lived with his mother, and finished in 1908. The Kiss painting is widely considered to be the greatest painting ever, better than even the Mona Lisa.


What make The Kiss outstanding from other paintings?

1. Its art is made of modernity and a very close relationship with the erotism.
2. The artist seeks to give a dimension almost crowned to his fabric.
3. It represent the topic of the pressure in love.
4. The use of symbolic and gold leaf as per following explanation; A couple is intertwined on a floor of flowers resembling a meadow, it is wrapped in a full gilded clothing. The decoration of this cape, with the image of a mosaic, varies according to the sex: black and white rectangles for the man, of the coloured circles and the flowers for the woman. Of this emergent unit heads and the hands which constitute the expression of a great intimacy. The knelt woman gives herself to her companion the closed eyes and lets herself go to passion love.
5. The artwork evokes a world of harmony where the couple is insulated in sublimation from the feeling in love, being unaware of the world real and evolving in an unreal and idealized world makes of a great power in love. Klimt compared the sexual pleasure to the artistic joy and gave him a spiritual dimension. It was also particularly attached to the representation of the ideal beauty.

What are interpretations of Klimt The Kiss?
1. The common gold shrouding, and indeterminate background evokes the timelessness, and union of selves that a kiss can engender.
2. The represents of how bright, beautiful, and golden everything is when you first kiss someone.
3. The man is lost in the kiss (faceless and unidentifiable) while the woman is turning her head away and is aloof from the kiss.
4. The female is succumbing to the male and experiencing a moment of sexual ecstasy.
5. A symbolic representation of the kiss of Apollo to Daphne at the moment she is transforming into a laurel tree (Ovid, The Metamorphosis).
6. The man is forcing a kiss on the woman who is turning away, but unable to escape.
7. The Kiss exemplifies a loss of self, reconciliation and unity that only lovers experience.
8. The couple stimulates opposing energies contributing to the connection. The man displays knowledge, black and white contrast, and binary information, as his energy towards the woman. The woman balances this by using her femininity, warmth, and decorous flowers as her energy towards the man. The woman is rooted in the ground, symbolizing her connection to “Mother Nature,” which means it’s only normal that she connects as the image of flowers. Underneath the man pictures of rabbits are visible and are benefiting from Mother Nature’s grass. This symbolism of balanced connection between the two parts is the essence of what love means.
9. Some think that Klimt and his beloved companion Emilie Flöge modeled for the masterpiece. However, this is not confirmed.
10. The Kiss is a discreet expression of Klimt’s emphasis on eroticism and the liberation therein. The Kiss falls in line with Klimt’s exploration of fulfillment and the redeeming, transformative power of love and art. The Kiss is deviant from Klimt’s frequent portrayal of women as the lascivious femme fatale.

Why The Kiss painting could be a great gift to impress your loved one?
The Kiss painting by Gustav Klimt is a fascinating icon of the loss of self that lovers experience. Only the faces and hands of this couple are visible; all the rest is great swirl of gold, studded with colored rectangles as if to express visually the emotional and physical explosion of erotic love.