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appearance. Everyone turned to stare.
    The city had provided the land for the building, and the imperial state would pay subsidies. The state wanted to be in on the ground floor, even if this art rebellion was aimed at them.
    But the artists had the upper hand.
    The emperor and his entourage had to come to them, to the debut exhibit of this Secession, to see what all the fuss was about.
    Even the emperor couldn’t upstage the charismatic Klimt.
    â€œHow surprised the general public was,” wroteEmil Pirchan, a young designer, “when it actually saw the artist himself: an energetic, large and powerful body with a head like that of an apostle on a strong bull neck—a head reminiscent of Dürer’s
Peter . . .
    â€œThe eyes, melancholy and unworldly, gazed out from a hard, tanned face, framed by a dark, severe beard. That, and the unruly coronet of hair, sometimes gave him a faun-like appearance,” Pirchan wrote, alluding to the mythic Bacchus, the wine-loving, hedonistic satyr beloved in Vienna.
    The empowered artists would later commemorate their triumph with a telling photograph.Carl Moll, Alma’s stepfather, lay on the floor of theSecession great hall, on top of a rolled-up carpet. Gustav Klimt, their president, sat smugly in a thronelike chair wearing a long black artist’s smock, handsome as a king. Koloman Moser sat at his feet, his eyebrows raised and mustache curled, with a picaresque, mocking smile. One artist is smoking. Two ordinary workmen in coveralls appear to be laughing. The photo was a mockery, a send-up of the self-important formal photographs of the bespectacled, graying members of the academy.
    It was a provocation. The artists were thumbing their nose at the Establishment.
    These artists named their Secession after the Parisian
Salon des refusés
—“exhibition of rejects”—reflecting their marginalization by pompous art officials. Now the Viennese Expressionist movement would have a home, along with the mad lucidity of the work ofVincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, whose
Shrik,
or Scream, would express the anxiety of his age. “If you cannot please all through your art, please a few,” Klimt wrote. “To please many is immoral.”
    Official guardians of propriety did not surrender so easily. In his poster announcing the opening of the Secession, Klimt portrayed Theseus, the warrior, in the nude, slaying the mythic Minotaur, a monster with a man’s body and bull’s head. Theseus represented the innovator, vanquishing the stale Old Guard of the official art world. But when the poster was printed, a Vienna official insisted Theseus’s genitals be covered. Klimt was furious. Censorship already? Ridiculous! There was already a painting of Theseus byAntonio Canova on prominent display, genitals and all, at the staid Kunsthistorisches Museum.
    The prudishness seemed absurd in a Vienna in which sexual tensions seemed everywhere, from the notorious affairs of the Habsburgs to the army of prostitutes walking the cobblestones of the Graben. At a time when Freud was exploring repressed sexual urges embedded in the psyche, Klimt was embarking on his own exploration, with erotic drawings of his models, sexually aroused, or even pleasuring themselves. What did women want? Klimt seemed to know.
    As Freud penned his
Interpretation of Dreams,
Klimt was launched on his own psychic interior voyage that would imbue his canvases with desire, childbirth, aging, and death. Both men were finding support among a small coterie of forward-minded Viennese, many of them Jewish.
    For Klimt and his confederates, the Secession was more than a place for new artists. It represented a break with an outmoded past, and the creation of a more honest way of experiencing life. It meant opening minds and society.As Klimt made drawings of a nude young woman for his painting of
Nuda Veritas,
or Naked Truth—a visual manifesto of the Secession—he