[3] Art critic Roberta Smith notes that Munch favored "long, somewhat slurpy brush strokes that were more stained than painted".

[5] The Norwegian symbolist artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) had to cope with disease, mental illness, and death in his family, as well as a strict and strongly religious father.

"Most of Munch’s figures," writes Roberta Smith, "are not mad, but paralyzed by oceanic feelings of grief, jealousy, desire or despair that many people found shocking either for their eroticism, crude style or intimations of mental instability.

[11] The author Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868–1927) was critical of the fused faces, finding them "look[ing] like a gigantic ear ... deaf in the ecstasy of the blood".

[12] The writer August Strindberg (1849–1912) gave a similar opinion, writing that the couple becomes "a fusion of two beings, of which the smaller, in the form of a carp, seems ready to devour the larger".

[12] Owing to the similarity of the room in The Kiss to Munch's own, as represented in Night in Saint-Cloud, art critic Ulrich Bischoff considers the painting to have an autobiographical element.