Tragedy

In April 1897 Klimt walked out of Vienna's official artists' association with a group of colleagues and founded the Secession, becoming its first president. In the same year he was finishing this sheet for a far more commercial client. It was made for Allegorien. Neue Folge, a portfolio the publisher Martin Gerlach sold to craftsmen and designers as working models, showing how an old studio subject might be handled now. The plate format is there in the drawing itself, with the word Tragoedie lettered in gold along the top and a woman in black holding up a grimacing theatre mask inside a lightly drawn ornamental border. Klimt worked it in pencil and in black and white chalk, touched with gold, on a sheet about 42 centimetres high. Gerlach's firm went on to print Ver Sacrum, the magazine of the Secession he had just helped start.