Ornament and Content: the Subject and Meaning of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

The article examines the most famous work of the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt — The Kiss. It analyses the insufficiency of the existing, most common both in academic and popular culture interpretations of this painting as an abstract image of lovers, a kind of “yin and yang” or the struggle and unity of the male and female opposites. For the first time in Russian research, evidence of a specific plot of The Kiss is provided. Based on the artist’s career, then-contemporary literature, the context of the creation of the painting, and its figurative and symbolic content, the plot of the painting is identified as the meeting of Ariadne and Dionysus on the island of Naxos. This, in turn, reveals the semantic content of The Kiss not as an abstract “icon of love” or the image of gender relations, as universally perceived, but broadly — as a symbol of the fullness of life in general, correlating, on the one hand, with the programs of R. Wagner and F. Nietzsche, and on the other hand, with the aspiration of Art Nouveau to the ultimate modernity. As a whole, The Kiss reconciles the conditional avant-garde of modernity with strict academicism, being a capacious and emotionally charged variation on a classic theme, performed in the current artistic language. At the same time, in the context of the artist’s own path, The Kiss, due to the reversal of the plot about Theseus and the Minotaur, which was put on the poster of the first Secession exhibition, becomes a sign of overcoming the crisis of 1905 associated with the failure of the artist’s Faculty paintings and the break with the Secession.