Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss-Art and the Biology of Early Human Development

초록

The Kiss (1907-1908) is the best-known painting of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), an Austrian painter of the European Art Nouveau, and was first exhibited in 1908 at the Vienna art show Raum 22 with the title Liebespaar (The Lovers). Depicting 2 lovers embracing against an abstract expanse of gold leaf on a painted bed of flowers, the painting hangs in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere museum. Admirers of Klimt’s painting have noted similarities between forms in the lovers’ garments and those of human gametes. Southgate wrote that “stylized sperm and ova” define the 2 figures, constituting a “richly embroidered tapestry of fecundity and joy.” Neuroscientist and Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel and art historian Susanna Partsch have also read sexual forms into the patterns on the lover’s garments, contrasting spermlike elements on the man’s cloak with ovoid counterparts on the woman’s dress.