Fable

In 1883 the Viennese publisher Martin Gerlach was assembling Allegorien und Embleme, a set of plates meant to update the old allegorical vocabulary for an age of commerce and machinery. He bought contributions from Max Klinger and Franz von Stuck, and from a 21-year-old who had just finished at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. Klimt's answer was this canvas. A young woman sits nude among the animals of Aesop's fables, watching them, in the Wien Museum's reading, so that she can write down later what they do. The handling is smooth and academic, the kind any Ringstraße jury would have passed without comment. Gerlach came back to him in the mid-1890s for a second set of allegories, and one of the drawings Klimt sent that time, Tragödie, is in the same museum today.