The Painted Kiss

In this passionate and atmospheric debut novel, Elizabeth Hickey reimagines the tumultuous relationship between the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, the woman who posed for Klimt's masterpiece The Kiss — and whose name he uttered with his dying breath.

Vienna in 1886 was a city of elegant cafés, grand opera houses, and a thriving and adventurous artistic community. It is here where the twelve-year-old Emilie meets the controversial libertine and painter. Hired by her bourgeois father for basic drawing lessons, Klimt introduces Emilie to a subculture of dissolute artists, wanton models, and decadent patrons that both terrifies and inspires her. The Painted Kiss follows Emilie as she blossoms from a naïve young girl to one of Europe's most exclusive couturiers — and Klimt's most beloved model and mistress. A provocative love story that brings to life Vienna's cultural milieu, The Painted Kiss is as compelling as a work by Klimt himself.

In this passionate and atmospheric debut novel, Elizabeth Hickey reimagines the tumultuous relationship between the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, the woman who posed for Klimt's masterpiece The Kiss -- and whose name he uttered with his dying breath.

Vienna in 1886 was a city of elegant cafés, grand opera houses, and a thriving and adventurous artistic community. It is here where the twelve-year-old Emilie meets the controversial libertine and painter. Hired by her bourgeois father for basic drawing lessons, Klimt introduces Emilie to a subculture of dissolute artists, wanton models, and decadent patrons that both terrifies and inspires her. The Painted Kiss follows Emilie as she blossoms from a naïve young girl to one of Europe's most exclusive couturiers -- and Klimt's most beloved model and mistress. A provocative love story that brings to life Vienna's cultural milieu, The Painted Kiss is as compelling as a work by Klimt himself.

Publishers Weekly

Hickey imagines the bonds between Gustav Klimt and his younger lover-whose name he pronounced with his dying breath-in her expressively written debut. Before Emilie Fl ge became the owner of a successful Viennese fashion house and Klimt became a famed, controversial painter, she was a privileged 12-year-old reluctantly taking drawing lessons and he was her starving artist teacher. From her WWII hideaway in the Austrian countryside in 1944, where she has transported Gustav's drawings ("all I could bring from Vienna... [perhaps] the only things of his to survive"), the aged Emilie flashes back to her fin-de-siecle hometown. Hickey traces the changing relationship between Klimt and his prot g from when she first became his art student as an adolescent through their on-again, off-again romance as she matures to their complicated relationship that culminates in the famed painting The Kiss. While the novel bears some obvious similarities to Girl with a Pearl Earring, it doesn't quite have that novel's power. But Hickey's language is sensual, lush and unhurried, and the prose wears its author's research gracefully. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Elizabeth Hickey's fascination with art history paints every page of her atmospheric, sensual debut novel The Painted Kiss -- in which she re-imagines a tempestuous relationship between painter Gustav Klimt and the daughter of a bourgeois businessman. "It was my thesis at Columbia, where it was referred to as 'fictionalized art history' -- not a compliment!" Hickey reveals in our interview.