“Of all the artists of the younger generation in Germany, Franz Stuck is one of the greatest, We have within the last ten years seen the rise of many highly original and individual talents, but their tendency, for the most part, is to an ingenious elaboration of their ideas; and there is scarcely another who can compare with Stuck in power and monumental greatness. German art, as it now is, would be inconceivable without Franz Stuck: it was he who succeeded in taking the painting of a whole country out of a groove, and starting it in a new path: his influence is to he seen in each single effort of German art. Such a man needs no subtlety of gift, but, on the contrary, the strength of a giant who will unflinchingly oppose all that is familiar with something new in art and in art-rnanufacture. and unheard-of, and thus become a leading spirit And this has not taken long to do; Stuck is but three-and-thiriy, and already he is recognised as a leader in Germany, he is, in fact, impossible to resist the fascinating influence of this self-made man. who so early in life has won the nimbus of lame.
“Stuck is the son of peasant parents, and was born in 1863 at Tettenweis, in Lower Bavaria. His schooling over, he went to Munich, where he studied first at the School for Industrial Art, and then at the Academy He was not, however one of there regular students there; and it is not the Academy that has made him what he is. Being obliged at an early age to work for his living, he first earned it by illustrations by which he laid the foundations of his lame. His first works appeared in two books on industrial art — Allegories and Emblems, to which he contributed largely: and Prints and Vignettes, entirely by his hand (Gerlaeh and Schenk, publishers, Vienna).” . . . It was in 1889, at the first exhibition in the Crystal Palace at Munich, that the name of Stuck, no longer unknown, was appended to three pictures. This was his debut as a painter, and decisively stamped his transition from a designer to a painter. — Paul Schultze-Naumberg
Works
Essays and Discussion Questions
- Pleasure and Pain: The Dual Aspects of Sin
- The spectacle of Christ in Franz Von Stuck's Crucifixion
- Art in a Time of Revolution: Avant-Gardes, Christ, and the End of an Era
Bibliography
Bisanz-Prakken, Marian. "Khnoppf, Toorop, Minne and the Symbolism of Gustav Klimt." Intermezzo: Gustav Klimt und Wien un 1900/Gustav Klimt and Vienna around 1900. Salzburg: Museum der Moderne Rupertinum, 2004.
Hofmann, Werner. Gustav Klimt. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1974.
Schultze-Naumberg, Paul. “Franz Stuck.” The Magazine of Art [London] 20 (1896-97): 153-58. Internet Archive version of a copy in the University of Toronto Library. Web. 4 November 2014.
Last modified 4 November 2014