The Painted Kiss: A Novel
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 Flöge 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-siècle hometown. Hickey traces the changing relationship between Klimt and his protégé 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 paintingThe Kiss. While the novel bears some obvious similarities toGirl 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.)--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.