Klimt’s Kiss and the Aesthetic of the Family

“The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt, 1907-1908

“Marriage is not about endorsing a sexual attachment between adults. It is about creating the conditions in which children can come into the world fully protected and with a fair chance of being loved.” — Roger Scruton

In March of 2022 I saw Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-1908) with my four-year-old daughter. As with all great paintings, no amount of technological advancement will ever capture the picture’s literal glow. Covered with gold leaf (yes, authentic gold) and flecks of platinum, both the canvas and the frame radiate with light from within, not without, as if a medieval illuminated manuscript. The effect naturally, and inevitably draws your attention—it certainly drew ours.

I knelt behind my daughter as we looked at the painting together, whispering about its meaning. I did not anticipate her response when I asked what she thought was happening. “She’s dead, daddy. And he’s bringing her back to life. He’s her prince, and she is coming to life with him… Well, now he’s the daddy and she’s the mommy.” My first inclination was to correct her with academic analysis. Thankfully, I just kissed her head and acknowledged her response, which then circulated through my mind for months thereafter.

I later learned that my daughter’s innocent reading of the painting goes against much of the scholarship regarding the work. In general, most art historians view the painting almost exclusively through a modern (Freudian) lens of sexuality. But my daughter still lives in Eden, free from the hyper-sexualized society we are constantly told we must inhabit. And from Eden she saw something more than the flesh alone. From my daughter’s eyes, the innocent eyes of a child, Klimt’s painting did not depict a sexualized kiss, but rather the entire aesthetic of life and living in our world—that aesthetic is the Family.

The Family—and the beauty/difficulty that the Family entails—constitutes the foundation of everything that you and I collectively value as a society, regardless of cultural, socio-economic, religious (etc.) differences. We exist because of the Family; your native language is your parent language, given by your mother in the womb (Family); when you graduate from university, you leave your “nourishing mother,” your Alma Mater, mater being Latin for mother (Family), etc. We cannot escape the Family. It is the singular unit of life upon which all suffering and happiness are grounded. Everything we value—if we are to value life at all—traces back to the Family. The Family is life; the Family is beauty, infinite and universal. This is the aesthetic of the Family. And in a brief moment, while kneeling beside her, my daughter showed me that this aesthetic gives The Kiss its transcendent beauty.

To see a glimpse of the painting’s familial beauty for yourself, we must use a mathematical metaphor (one interpretive tool among many in this case): squaring the circle. This ancient mathematical problem, first recorded by the Greeks, sought a method for drawing a square with the same area of a circle in a limited number of steps—making the circle equal to a square, or finite. The combination proved impossible as the circle is a shape of infinite proportions (for example, π, the foundational number for the area of a circle, is an irrational number or a number that has no end) and cannot be limited to something finite like a square. The problem thus came to represent the (impossible) attempt to make finite something infinite, or rather, to make mortal the immortal.

Over time, squaring the circle became a metaphor for humanist representations of the Divine. At the end of the Divina Commedia, Dante records that words alone were insufficient to express his experience in Paradise. So he compares his dilemma to squaring the circle: “As the geometer intently seeks / to square the circle, but he cannot reach, / through thought on thought, the principle he needs / so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see / the way in which our human effigy / suited the circle and found place in it—” (Paradiso 33.133-138).

In depicting the divine, infinite aesthetic of the Family (however unconsciously), Klimt, like Dante, leans heavily on this same mathematic motif in The Kiss. For example, the frame itself is a perfect square, 180 cm x 180 cm, representing mortal life as finite, limited, and destined to end. Yet within the painting are images of flowing, circular infinities: the veil (itself covered in circles) forms an ethereal halo-like curve (circle) around the man and the woman, representing the infinitude of their embrace and mutual love. Thus, within the mortal boundary of their finite life together (the square frame), they find infinite meaning in their familial bond (the circular/infinite image of love): a squaring of the circle.

The painting likewise mirrors the familial narrative of creation in Genesis—the Bible itself a kind of finite (square) repository housing the infinite (circle) word of God. When read from left to right, the first character to appear is the earth, then the man, then the woman—the woman crowning and marking the end of creation, symbolized by the end of the earth. In imitating the biblical account, the man and the woman represent a metaphorical first family, or The Family: Adam and Eve, stepping out of their infinite garden into the finitude of mortality. And from their union (and exit from Eden) comes the flourishing of life on the land below their feet, symbolizing their familial gift to all (to you and I) of life itself.

Beyond metaphor, however, these circle and square motifs more explicitly appear in the robes of both the man (square) and the woman (circle). Physically, the man kneels in reverence with the woman in a straight (square) posture, with his cloak covered in squared rectangles as representations of stature, strength, and protective virility. As the man represents the square, he gives finite (mortal) form to the infinity of the woman’s creation (children).

The woman, the bearer of life, is reciprocally adorned with circles, symbolizing the godliness and infinitude of her creative (in the literal sense) powers (circle). When the two become one, they constitute the squaring of the circle, symbolically and literally (as a family) giving a mortal frame to an immortal spirit in the possibility of children. And in this familial squaring of the circle, the squares begin to curve and the circles quadrangulate. On the woman’s shoulders are painted squares, symbolizing her ability to ease the masculine burdens placed squarely upon the man; in contrast, circles form around the man’s frame, near his bowels, filling him with mercy, love, and compassion from the woman. In this squaring of the circle, neither is without the other; both give together freely, and in unison. And from their familial union (the squaring of the circle) at the precipice of being (represented at the end of the physical earth) comes a trail of golden ivy, emanating from the veil and flowing beyond the canvas and into the heart of the viewer—a second witness to the life given in familial beauty. This is the divine aesthetic of family life given in the painting, hidden in plain sight for only a child to see.

If this painting were merely a representation of sex, my daughter would never have had any interested in it (she likely would have been repulsed by it). But she did, as did I; for the painting represents something much more real than the fleeting temporality of our sex-obsessed culture. W. B. Yeats put it best when he wrote, “sexual desire dies because every touch consumes the myth.” Yet my thinking and dwelling on this painting has only multiplied.

In a rather mysterious way, the painting portrays the eternal beauty of the Family, the only sustaining ground upon which we maintain everything of value. While our contemporary culture would place sex as the uniquely important identifier of everything that is/can be/ought to be, remember the wise words of Yeats, and the innocent insights of my daughter. A healthy culture cannot survive by basing the entirety of identity and cultural production/understanding on the one thing that it also calls the ubiquitous form of recreation. But a culture grounded in the intrinsic and necessary beauty of the Family will. We do now, and will more than ever, depend on the Family for a floral world that is beautiful, lovely, of good report, and praiseworthy—a world in which we will continue to live, in every sense of the word. And if beauty is to save our world, as Dostoevsky prophesied, it seems to me that we will all need children to teach us what it looks like.

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