Dot grid notebooks with beautiful, vibrant art covers
- MULTIPURPOSE: Perfect for taking notes, drawing, jotting down thoughts, and just about anything.
- COVER DESIGN: "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt (1908)
- SIZE: 8.5 x 11 inches - 100 pages - Large Size - Dot Grid Interior
What makes "The Kiss" so special?
It was in Venice, Italy, at the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna located in Ca' Pesaro, the most important baroque Venetian palace, that Robert Langdon, the main character in Dan Brown's Inferno, saw for the first time Gustave Klimt's masterpiece The Kiss while it was on loan from Vienna.
Langdon credited Venice's Ca' Pesaro with arousing his lifelong gusto for modern art.
The Kiss (in German, Liebespaar, Lovers) is an oil painting with added silver and gold leaf by the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt.
It is considered a masterpiece of the early modern period, an icon of the Jugendstil-Viennese Art Nouveau-and is considered Klimt's most popular work.
In The Kiss, as in the last phase of the Beethoven Frieze, a man and a woman melt into each other. Their bodies are obscured by a thick gold cloak, but Klimt doesn't hold back from suggesting what lies underneath. A pattern of erect rectangles covers the man, while concentric circles decorate the woman. Again, their individual forms fuse into a single, phallic column, which is shrouded by an oval, vaginal halo. Bade even goes so far as to describe the flowers that cascade down the woman's side as "spermatozoa-like ornament," indicating "that the moment of climactic ecstasy has just passed." Whether or not Klimt was indeed referencing sperm, this patterning certainly illustrates the moments in his work when "the anatomy of the models becomes ornamentation, and the ornamentation becomes anatomy," as art historian Alessandra Comini has written.
When the painting was exhibited in 1908, at Vienna's annual "Kunstschau," it was almost universally celebrated as a masterpiece. Before the exhibition had even closed, Austria's king purchased it for a whopping sum of 25,000 crowns (the equivalent of about $250,000 today). Klimt's days as a controversial figure were over, but he hadn't sacrificed his core beliefs: to express the deep, enduring power of human emotion and desire through art.
