The Kiss

263 wooden pieces / 280x280x5mm (approx. 11x11x0.25")

This delightful 263 piece puzzle contains over 20 whimsy pieces, many of them multipart. Unique connectors and irregular shaped pieces will enhance your puzzling experience!

This puzzle comes in our beautiful, premium quality packaging - a very sturdy box with a magnetic closure. It will look fabulous on your bookshelf or coffee table!

Gustav Klimt depicts the couple locked in an intimate embrace against a gold, flat background. The two figures are situated at the edge of a patch of flowery meadow that ends under the woman's exposed feet. The man wears a robe printed with geometric patterns and subtle swirls. He wears a crown of vines while the woman wears a crown of flowers. She is shown in a flowing dress with floral patterns. The man's face is not shown to the audience and instead, his face is bent downward to press a kiss to the woman's cheek, and his hands are cradling the woman's face. Her eyes are closed, with one arm wrapped around the man's neck, the other resting gently on his hand, and her face is upturned to receive the man's kiss.

Klimt painted The Kiss soon after his three-part Vienna Ceiling series, which created a scandal and were criticized as both "pornographic" and evidence of "perverted excess". The works had recast the artist as an enfant terrible for his anti-authoritarian and anti-popularist views on art. He wrote, "If you can not please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few".

The Kiss was exhibited in 1908 in Vienna in the Kunstschau – the building created in collaboration by Josef Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt, Otto Prutscher, Koloman Moser and many others, to coincide with the celebrations in Vienna for the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Francis Joseph I’s reign from 1 June to 16 November 1908.

The Kiss, however, was enthusiastically received, and was purchased, still unfinished, by the Austrian government when it was put on public exhibition.

Material: 5mm Linden Plywood

Artist: Gustav Klimt, 1908

Cut Design: Aidan Knowles

Article code: 24410 - April 2024

Barcode: 5056461101966