Why did master painter Klimt draw red blood cells on the kiss?
Feb 05, 2025
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If you look closely at the work, you can see a red disk clustered in the woman's chest and knees, which is reminiscent of red blood cells to the doctor's eyes. The red disks bring the entire picture to life by exquisitely combining the biological significance of red blood cells in 'Kiss' with the psychological colors transmitted through red. As a result, it can be seen that the clothes of the two main characters on the canvas contain a three-day narrative of the birth of life and a physiological story that supports it.
First of all, if you look at the shape of red blood cells in the work in a medical context, a paper written by Landsteiner (1868-1943), who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for revealing the existence of the ABO blood type, will be published in the 1901 Wien Klin Wochenschr, Austria.
Professor Emil Zuckerkandl, who had a close relationship with Klimt, was included in the magazine's editorial staff, so a link to Klimt could be found. In fact, Professor Zuckerkandl gave anatomical lectures for artists at Klimt's request in 1903, and it is well known that he had a great influence on Klimt's work (Yu Im-ju, 'Anatomy Klimt', 2024). In addition, Klimt's study confirmed that there was an encyclopedia (Meyers ß Konversations-Lexikon) that was widely distributed in Germany at the time, indicating that Klimt referenced a color picture of blood cells, including red blood cells, in the encyclopedia.
Furthermore, if you look at the lower part of the red blood cell located in the chest of 'Kiss', the woman's arm is bent, and if you look at the outline, it resembles a heart. In other words, the location is a drawing of blood cells located in the heart, and it can be seen that the energy of life is transmitted to the woman's body and the life just conceived in it through the heartbeat, and the entire picture has intense energy.
Meanwhile, blood cells drawn on a woman's knee appear to be physiological blood. Menstrual blood expresses the age at which a woman can have children. In other words, Klimt seems to have drawn the meaning of menstruation in a picture as a necessary condition for human development.
To find out why Klimt placed red blood cells in 'Kiss', the research team created 'Kiss, RBC Knockout Kiss', a picture in which the red blood cell part was deleted from the original work, and the revised picture was displayed along with the original work to conduct a survey of 300 visitors who participated in the Ulsan International Art Fair (UiAF) in 2022. The audience thought of the words intensity, splendor, vitality, beauty, and young love while looking at the original, while the revised painting reminded them of monotony, silence, and lifeless death.
Professor Yoo Im-joo of the Anatomy Class at Korea University School of Medicine said, "'Kiss' by Klimt is a masterpiece that expresses the ecstatic love of the two lovers and naturally blends art and medicine.'"This work impresses the public by expressing science obtained from the best technologies of its time with artistic metaphors, and this fusion of science and culture holds great significance for us living in the modern world."
Meanwhile, the research team published a comprehensive three-day study of human outbreaks in the journal JAMA (American Medical Association), a global medical journal, in Klimt's 'Kiss'. The research team compared the patterns and symbols drawn by Klimt with medical literature and found that sperm, eggs, and fertilization processes were shown in the clothes of men and women in 'Kiss'.
This study is a follow-up study on this, and was published on the Journal of Korean Medical Sciences website under the title Medico-Artistic Analysis of Red Blood Cells in Gustav Klimt's 'The Kiss'.
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This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
