Franz von Stuck

In his American debut at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Franz von Stuck (1863–1928) was praised by critics as “one of the most versatile and ingenious of contemporary German artists.” The renowned Symbolist painter, architect, designer, and cofounder of the Munich Secession exhibited his most famous painting, Sin, an iconic work of the fin de siècle, at the Third Annual Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1898. Two years later, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Stuck was awarded a gold medal for furniture he designed for his magnificent villa in Munich, a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. In 1909, he was included in the Exhibition of Contemporary German Art which premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Copley Society in Boston. The same year he was awarded a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth and the 120th anniversary of his American debut, Franz von Stuck is celebrated in the first monographic exhibition in the United States dedicated to his accomplishments. The exhibition showcases his graphic and architectural design and his photography, as well as spectacular canvases that generated both praise and controversy among American critics of his day for their “cachet of strangeness, which comes from a modern treatment of legendary, biblical, mystic or symbolic subjects.” These masterworks include Lucifer, 1890, from the National Gallery for Foreign Art, Sofia, Bulgaria; Pietà, 1891, from the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Wild Chase, 1899, from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France; Sin, ca. 1908, from the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and Inferno, 1908, from the Mugrabi Collection.

The exhibition, a joint project of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, is accompanied by a catalogue that examines Stuck’s theory of the spatial qualities of color; his influence on Josef Albers, Vassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee; his breach with naturalism; and his willing embrace of the transformative ideas of his day as articulated by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Richard Wagner. The handsome, fully-illustrated 172-page publication documents for the first time Stuck’s participation in major international exhibitions in the United States and the reception of his work in the New World.