Franz von Stuck: German Symbolist Painter & “Prince of Art”

Franz von Stuck is best remembered today as one of the most notable German artists at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries. His artistic career started after his move to Munich at age 15, where he enlisted in the Academy in 1881. Munich was an important artistic center where Stuck gained his breakthrough with the painting Guardian of Paradise in 1889. Soon he moved away from traditional art, co-founding Munich Secession in 1892, and ironically, became a professor at the Munich Academy.

Besides painting, Von Stuck was also a prolific sculptor and decorator, often making frames for his paintings and designing furniture. A decade after the Great War, Stuck’s art suffered compared to other Symbolists. In a post-war pessimism, his work was irrelevant to the oncoming generations. Franz von Stuck, the artist of dream-like visions of religious and classical subjects, eerie landscapes, and femmes fatales, died in 1928 in relative obscurity.

Franz von Stuck, a miller’s son, was born in 1863 in the idyllic southern German village of Tettenweis. Even at a young age, he displayed a love of drawing. Despite his social background, he enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Munich in 1878, and three years later, he entered the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. As a student, Stuck supported himself as an illustrator for magazines and books of contemporary allegories. Unlike the art he is known for, these early designs were in the academic tradition Stuck had adopted during his education.

Between 1882 and 1884, several of Stuck’s drawings were published in Allegorien und Embleme. They foreshadow his break from the current trend of historicism and introduce compositions and subjects of his own.

A humorous undertone of Stuck is seen in drawings for Karten und Vignetten, a portfolio of 50 designs for wine lists, menus, and invitation cards showing boys at play. In Karten und Vignetten, Stuck also introduced the Dionysian Pan figures, fauns, and other fabulous beings, which would dominate his art for the rest of his career. Soon, Stuck’s attitude began completely changing. He rarely bothered to attend the Academy, preferring to consider himself self-taught.

Breakthrough in Munich Artistic Circles

At the end of the 1880s, Franz von Stuck began a move toward Symbolism with the Guardian of Paradise, which he presented at the annual exhibition at Munich Glass Palace in 1889. For him, it was the confirmation of his artistry. It won the 26-year-old artist a gold medal and a large sum of money as well as caught the eyes of many critics. The Guardian of Paradise made a split from the art favored by the Academy and the widely popular peasant genre of Franz von Defregger. It could not be categorized as Naturalist, plein-air, nor Impressionist, all the movements praised by the avant-garde of Munich.

With this painting, Stuck came closer to images of the soul as seen in the works of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger or to the tradition of English Pre-Raphaelites. The biblical cherub appointed by God to guard the entry to Paradise is transformed into the ideal of an androgynous youth, considered the ideal embodiment of a being raised above humanity. In the background, the colors burst out to show Paradise as an ethereal realm beyond visible reality.

The last decade of the 19th century is Stuck’s highest point in the Munich artistic circles. From the beginning of the 19th century, Munich grew into Germany’s main artistic center. With the construction of the Glyptothek, the collection of classical sculptures, the Alte Pinakothek (Old Piankothek), and the Neue Pinakothek (New Piankothek), the city now had the country’s leading museums.

In 1892, disputes within the Künstlergenossenschaft (Munich Artist Association), which organized the Munich Glass Palace exhibitions, culminated when about 100 dissidents, including Bruno Piglhein, Hugo von Habermann, Fritz von Uhde, and Franz von Stuck, broke away and set up the Munich Secession.

The year 1893 was crucial for Stuck’s career. Not only was he granted royal professorship, but the first Secessionist exhibition, which Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria supported, was a resounding success. Despite this, Stuck believed that he received official recognition only with the critical acclaim of his painting Sin, exhibited at the Secession exhibition and bought by the Neue Pinakothek.

In 1895, Stuck became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. As a professor, he thought and shaped the future avant-garde artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

Franz married the American Mary Lindpaintner in 1897. Just a year later, he had the Villa Stuck built, demonstrating his design, sculpture, interior decoration, and architecture skills. The villa is loaded with symbolism and works from the artist, including reliefs of godly processions leading to the studio. World War II took its toll on the house, destroying many works of art.

Franz von Stuck’s works from the last decade of the 19th century belong to the Symbolist movement and its interests in the inner self. A common theme for Stuck, and Symbolism in general, was the femme fatale, the dangerous woman. Stuck’s embodiment of Sin is the paradigmatic image of German Symbolism. A black snake wraps the pale woman, identified as Eve. Both the woman and animal look directly at the viewer. Eve is no longer a weak female falling for Satan’s temptation, as normally depicted throughout art history. She is evil and entraps the viewer, or the Man, with her gaze.

Franz von Stuck’s introverted side is revealed through a rarely considered genre of his art, landscapes. Around 1890, Stuck could be regularly found in the artists’ colony at Osternberg, a picturesque place in the Innviertel. It was here that Stuck started making studies for his Trout Pond that reflects contemporary Symbolist tendencies. The dark tree trunks, which are reflected in the dark waters of the pond, the concentric circles caused by a rising fish, and the gentle glow of twilight create a melancholy, slightly ominous mood. The motif of still water and reflections on its surface is associated with positive narcissism. Just like Narcissus, the youth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who bends over the water to be united with his reflection and ignores the outside world in order to withdraw into himself, the artist is a lonely figure who is wrapped up in himself, in his own created world.

Though considered chiefly a painter, Franz von Stuck did not confine himself to a single medium. Athlete, Stuck’s first bronze sculpture arose from a visit to Rome in the company of Max Klinger, with whom he shared the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art). He already showed a fairly plastic approach to the figures in his paintings, so this was a natural next step for his art. The linear, contour effects of the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand influence a big part of Stuck’s sculptural work. It also reflects his belief in the revival of classical art. The Athlete is designed to present a different view from each side. The tension and force of the athlete, who stands with both feet firmly on the base to defy the ball’s weight, result from countless anatomical studies.

Stuck received a gold medal in 1900 at the World’s Fair in Paris for the furniture of his villa, showing that he was also a talented designer. As in sculpture, the form is derived from ancient Greek examples or other contemporary designs. The red chair was a favorite prop for Stuck’s portraits, notably of his wife, Mary. Its rectilinear look is inspired by the cube-shaped furniture of the Austrian designer Josef Hoffmann.

Death and Legacy

After the end of the Great War and the chaos it caused, the Symbolist themes of the fin-de-siècle seemed largely irrelevant to the art world. Franz von Stuck, who had risen to become a German “prince of art,” according to his funeral address, became increasingly isolated towards the end of his life and was almost forgotten after his death on 30th August 1928.

In 20th-century art history, Stuck’s work was not assessed at its proper value and was unfairly dismissed as the legacy of a past age. Only with the reopening of the Villa Stuck in 1968 was there a revival of interest in Stuck’s life and art. Nonetheless, at that time, opinions among art historians still differed regarding the nature of his achievement. His art was certainly innovative in the sense that the flat, decorative compositions and aperspectival structure of his paintings played a significant role in the genesis of modern art. His symbolic themes were, in fact, a cover for depicting passionate love or battles between the sexes, subjects that remain relevant to this day.