Gustav Klimt: Secession and Pallas Athena (1898)

The textual section which provides the viewer with the necessary data on the place and date of the exhibition is confined to a block of text along the lower edge; regarding the place of exhibition, the text of the final drawing differs slightly from the printed version.

The explanatory title “Theseus und Minotaurus” is printed to the left-hand side of the scene.

The words “Ver Sacrum,” which appear twice, are to be understood programmatically, ...

... the slogan “Heiliger Frühling” (Sacred Spring) alludes to the optimistic strivings toward the rebirth and renewal of art that was the central aspiration of the Secessionists.

In 1898, Klimt produced the oil painting of Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and art who was invoked as a key figure and tutelary goddess by the new Viennese artists’ association, just as she had been earlier by the Munich Secession, founded in 1892.

The protective goddess confronts the viewer with an aggressive pose, thereby holding him at a distance. Her metal breastplate in the form of a Medusa’s head grins at us, at the same time showing us its tongue—an undisguised polemic against the critics of the Secession.

In her right hand, she holds a small female figure—not Nike, the winged goddess of victory, as in traditional depictions of Pallas Athena, but instead a nude figure which holds a mirror up to the viewer, and which may be interpreted as embodying Nuda Veritas, or “Naked Truth”.

Recognizable in the background is the struggle between Hercules (personification of a new art) and the sea monster Triton (emblem of stiffness and conservatism), a scene which Klimt adopted directly from two early Greek bowls decorated in black-figure style by the painter Tleson.

Klimt’s Pallas Athena, then, may be interpreted as allegorical and programmatic image for the Secession, one that anticipates stylistically the hotly contested Symbolist ceiling paintings he would later execute for the assembly hall of the university.