In 1907 Gustav Klimt was working in Vienna on what is now called his 'Golden Phase'. The 180 × 180 cm square *Der Kuss* (The Kiss) is the central work of this period. Two figures — a kneeling couple at the edge of a flowery meadow — are wrapped in a robe of real gold leaf. The rectangles on the man's side, the circular and oval ornaments on the woman's dress, are distinct but emerge from the same gold ground.

Two sources meet in Klimt: the gold ground of the Ravenna mosaics at San Vitale, which he visited in 1903 — a thirteen-hundred-year-old Byzantine technique — and the new psychological sensibility of Viennese modernism (Freud was working in the same city in the same years). The lower half of the painting is on the edge of a cliff; the man's feet stand almost over the void. Love is shown here not as a safe encounter but as a balancing act at an uncertain edge.

The woman's face is visible but her eyes are closed; the man's face is hidden. The only 'naked' area is the woman's hand and face. The eroticism — scandalous to contemporaries — lives not in the figures' position but in these small open patches of skin.

The painting was bought by the Austrian government at the 1908 Kunstschau exhibition where it debuted; it now hangs at the Belvedere palace. Klimt was a founding member of the Vienna Secession, formed against the 19th-century Academy — and the work is the aesthetic summary of that movement: the position that ornament is not a forbidden luxury but a legitimate instrument of modern art.