Nuda Veritas

By 1899 Klimt had helped break away from Vienna's art establishment to found the Secession, and this comes close to a statement of what that group stood for. He called it Nuda Veritas, naked truth, and took the title at his word, a woman standing full-front and completely bare, holding up a mirror to whoever looks at her. Above her head runs a line from the poet Schiller: if you cannot please everyone with your art, please a few, for to please many is bad. It was aimed at the comfortable Viennese public, and it landed as an insult. A snake curls at her feet, added after an earlier drawn version of the figure. The loose red hair and the flowers scattered around her would soon become a manner he never quite put down.