Edvard Munch – The Kiss

The Kiss

The Kiss by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1897, held under inventory number MM.M.00059 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 81 x 99 cm. In a darkened interior a man and a woman stand embracing, and their two faces have fused into a single form.

The couple stands at the centre of the canvas and occupies almost its whole height. The man is at the left in a dark reddish-brown coat; the woman is at the right in a darker dress, her arm reaching up to his shoulder. A thin orange-red line runs along that arm and shoulder, the only warm contour on either figure. Their heads are pressed together so that the features of both faces disappear: there are no eyes and no mouths to be seen, only one shared plane.

At the left stands a tall narrow window with a pale curtain drawn aside. Through it comes pale yellow-cream and blue-grey light with small pink and blue marks; this is the only source of light in the scene. To the right of the couple the wall is dark purple-brown, with faint reddish circular marks barely visible on it. In the lower left corner lies a greenish-blue plane of floor with pale curving strokes. The canvas is painted right to its edge, so that the tacking edge is visible too.

Munch treated the kiss motif more than once, in paintings and in the celebrated woodcuts, where the two bodies merge into a single outline even further. Our reproduction follows the painted version of 1897 measuring 81 x 99 cm, in the Munch Museum. The fusing of the two faces is not clumsiness or an unfinished passage but the thing that makes the picture what it is; contemporary critics held it against him, and today it is taken as the point.

The paint is dark and laid on in thin, translucent layers through which the weave of the canvas shows in places. The transitions between coat, dress and wall are so soft that the edges are lost, and the couple separates from the background chiefly by being darker still than it is. The only sharply placed elements are the window and that thin red line.

Ours is a hand-painted oil reproduction, made in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. As a fine art reproduction this is among the harder ones on the shelf, since it depends on hitting very close intervals between dark tones.

The painting is dark, intimate and upright, so it belongs in a smaller room where the viewer comes close: a bedroom, a narrow wall beside a door, or a quiet corner of a living room. Do not hang it opposite a window, since the glass reflects in the dark surface and the scene disappears. The wall should be warm and not stark white; a deep grey, brick or dark green ground supports the dark tones, whereas on a white wall the painting reads as a dark patch. The light should be warm and angled from the side.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.