If we could sum up fin-de-siècle Vienna with an image, it would be the Nuda Veritas that Gustav Klimt painted in 1899, a representation of the naked truth that the members of the Secession chose as an emblem. Defenders of a new way of creating and in confrontation with the generation of their parents, the liberal bourgeoisie that had shaped the Vienna of the time, this group of artists played the lead in one of the many oedipal rebellions that took place in the city of Sigmund Freud. This feminine nude, with a serpent slithering at her feet, represents an Eve offering us not an apple but a mirror in which to behold ourselves and see the naked truth, as against the hypocrisy and falsehood of the Vienna of that period. The text from Friedrich Schiller at the top of the painting is certainly arrogant because the message is essentially that it is bad to try to please many, that it suffices to please a few... 

‘Viena 1900-1918: Wagner, Freud, Klimt’ at Fundación March[+]