Our first contact with The Kiss by Gustav Klimt is still quite gentle. All this gold shimmers our eyes, all these patterns caress our eyes, all this light radiates our senses. At first glance, the scene depicted is full of love: two bodies embrace and merge perfectly, the man placing a kiss on the cheek of the woman with delicately closed eyes. This woman nestled against his chest is Emilie Flöge, the painter’s bourgeois companion, who appears to us here both ultra-in love and in full exaltation of her golden cycle.
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Except that behind this apparent bliss, there is still a downside, a thorny downside, which strikes our analysis of the painting after the fact. I confess to having never appreciated the composition of the bodies in this masterpiece: the woman is crushed by the man, dominating in a fit of what we associate with love, but is that Really ? We cannot question the artist’s feelings towards his partner, but we can wonder what type of love it was. What are the balance of power, the power dynamics at play? Because Emilie Flöge was twelve years his junior, and this kiss takes place on the edge of an abyss. What is the fate of this embrace and what does it really say?
The position of the submissive woman, on her knees, with her neck twisted, grabbed by the nape of the neck and clinging to this masculine and menacing silhouette with its hunched back has never charmed me. I would even say that there is better, as a loving stretch. Look at his hands, which grip his sweetheart’s face, and her hand, which seems to be stopping him from squeezing her too much. And also look at the feet of this woman, not comfortably installed: they are slipping away from the edge of an abyss. In a documentary, directed by Ali Ray and broadcast on Arte, we learn that initially, these feet did not hang in the air, but clung to the earth.
What happened in the meantime to make the painter decide otherwise, and shift these feet slightly so that they are exposed to the abyss? Stefanie Jahn, head of the conservation department at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, reveals that erased that beard. Perhaps we should see here an attempt on his part to appear in a more innocent light? However, the painter makes his well-muscled character wear black rectangles, more severe and rigid, which contrast with the flowery and naive dress of his other half.
Klimt and women
Evolving in working class and bourgeois circles, Klimt became “the painter of women” thanks to the orders that rained in from heads of wealthy families who wanted to see their wives and daughters represented by the artist. “We can think that a woman who agrees to be painted wants us to pay homage to her deep nature, to her character. However, this is precisely what is missing in Klimt’s portraits of women. He was not very interested in rendering the essential character traits of his models. He didn’t want to explore their personalities. On the contrary, he subjected women to his artistic and stylistic will. […] For the artist, the woman is not more important than the background in which she sits”analyzes Stephanie Auer, curator at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, in the documentary.
Indeed, in his first portraits, the women stand out largely from the background, but, gradually, during his golden cycle in particular, they blend more and more into flat areas, like chameleons relaying their agency to a purely ornamental function. . “The vision he has of women depends largely on their social origin”, continues the specialist, pointing out the nudes that the painter reserved for very young girls from underprivileged classes, who posed to earn their living in the Austrian capital. Often they were staged during sapphic antics and, for the context of the time, despite the precarious (and potentially problematic) conditions in which these drawings were made, these quasi-abstract works were a big step in representation of lesbianism. Throughout his career, the artist was accused of pornography, both for his portraits of women and men.
“We know that twelve or fourteen acknowledgments of paternity were filed after his death. He slept freely with his models but also with the high society women he painted,” says Patrick Bade, author, in the Arte documentary, Klimt and “The Kiss”. Six paternity cases have been proven, with three long-term lovers. Baris Alakus outbids: “He abandons many women when they have a child or when they become pregnant. His mother and sisters cook for him and wash his clothes. Rich women support him financially. Whatever the situation, he has women at his disposal and he uses them.” In addition to having to face “his stubborn nature”, relates Google Arts & Culture reporting the words of Helene Luise, the niece of Father Flöge of whom he subsequently became the guardian, Emilie Flöge must have helped her create, without ever being cited, the drafts of her large paintings “by covering the already drawn parts with gold leaf”.
Pro you love bombing and lovelorn cad
Klimt never married Emilie Flöge. He never lived with her and never had children with her, preferring to womanize and have a series of adventures. The Kiss is actually love bombing a little toxic. “The two lovers rarely saw each other during the day, because the painter worked in his studio and did not want any company. […] They met mainly in the evening. […] Emilie Flöge was constantly at Gustav Klimt’s side, especially at official events […]. This is how Emilie Flöge ended up being nicknamed ‘Frau Klimt’ [la femme de Klimt] in Viennese society. […] It was when they went on vacation together that the relationship between Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge was most intense. Every summer they spent a few weeks in the countryside, often at Lake Attersee in Upper Austria. lit-on.
This is typical behavior of love bombingwhich draws all its malignity from hot-cold, from the expression of explosive romantic feelings occurring after a long period of unjustified and cold distance. To flatter his various mistresses, he shared his genius with them by offering them a sublime painting: such was his cad technique. A bit like this guy who sends the same message of love in a text message sent to several simultaneous recipients – we recognize that there is still more determination and work in the case of a Klimt. Upon his sudden death, however, the painter made a generous gesture, naming Emilie Flöge heir to a large part of his property – the rest going to his sisters.
“The Kiss is a bittersweet depiction. She seems chaste, but in reality, she is not as romantic as we imagine. I think of all those teenagers who had this poster in their room! I see violent sexual urges beneath this glistening surface. When I kiss a person I love, I don’t put my hands around their neck, and they themselves don’t try to pull away. There is incredible violence in this painting. We feel a real tension between the massive masculine presence, which dominates the woman, and the latter who is frail and fragile. Such tension is very strange in a work supposed to celebrate love,” attests specialist author Gavin Plumley.
In The Kiss, Gustav Klimt wanted to freeze the dynamics of their relationship at a given moment and represent in symbols everything that this love implied. It therefore seems, from the superior positioning of the man in the canvas, that its author dominated “his muse”, under influence. Perhaps Emilie Flöge was not impressionable, did not want to be in a relationship and preferred to maintain a certain freedom to juggle with other lovers. We are not going to speak for her: perhaps she was not a woman forced into a kiss, chained to this golden and unhealthy union, as these ankles trapped in creeping ivy lead us to think. We will never know what these characters are thinking, pressed together in their love. It is up to us to invent the story and project our anxieties and our poetry onto it. In light of all these events that have occurred in everyone’s lives, you will perhaps ask yourself all these questions about the nature of these ambiguous relationships the next time you contemplate this masterpiece.
It’s while leafing through the beautiful book Klimt. L’art plus grandwritten by Philippe Thiébaut, that we were able to immerse ourselves in these reflections. If you want to get it, the work is published by Hazan Editions.
