There is a tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian in Franz von Stuck’s work. Nietzsche’s contemporary and a kindred spirit, Stuck valiantly searched for a way out of nihilism- beyond Good and Evil- by seeking to expose the psychological underpinnings of morality. He mined the depths of the subconscious and challenged long-held beliefs. With comprehensive inquiries into Franz von Stuck’s art such as the 1995 retrospective exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the 2013 exhibition held at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, a once grossly overlooked artist is emerging from the shadows. The breadth of his influence on modern art is dazzling.
Like many talented young art students, Stuck was plucked by Gerlach & Schenk publishers in Vienna to contribute illustrations for Allegories und Embleme and other publications beginning in 1878 for which he continued until 1888. He officially debuted as a painter in 1889 in Munich at the Artist Association where he was awarded a gold medal. Growing success in the next several years at exhibitions throughout Germany led to State-commissioned work and by age 30, Stuck had become a full professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
That same year, 1893, Stuck organized the first exhibition of the Munich Secession. Driving this avant-garde group was an anti-nationalist undercurrent which instead favored pluralism. This showed in a willingness to collaborate with artists from all places, an openness to varieties of styles and multi-disciplinary thought as well as a de-emphasis placed on any distinction made between the so-called high and applied arts. A shaper of these tenets, Stuck’s belief in the “total work of art” concept -or gesamtkunstwerk- was beautifully demonstrated in his Munich Villa Stuck which he completed in 1890. Now with the Munich Secession, Stuck’s art and guiding principles began to gain traction. His art was included later that year in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the largest attended World Fair in history. At Paris’ l’Exposition Universelle in 1900, Stuck received a gold medal for the furniture he designed for Villa Stuck. Other artists receiving praise at the Exposition, such as Gustave Klimt, had already taken note of the Munich Secession and Stuck’s influence is unmistakable. Five years after the Munich Secession’s first exhibit, Klimt’s group formed the Vienna Secession. From their mission statement and exhibition format to later publications, there is no question that Stuck’s Munich Secession was their model to follow. Klimt’s inaugural Pallas Athena poster design dating from 1898 is remarkably similar to Stuck’s painting of Pallas Athena and Stuck’s exhibition poster from 1897. Stuck’s group also caught the interest of many Americans, including Alfred Stieglitz, who, in an article published in Century Magazine, credited the Munich Secession’s significant role in establishing pictorial photography.
Stuck continued to exhibit his work in the United States until his death in 1928. True to Nietzsche, Stuck indeed has succeeded at being in a perpetual state of becoming. Students of Stuck’s at the Munich Academy, such as Wasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Josef Albers owe much of their own development in the arts to him. Bridging Symbolism with non-objective art through his theoretical inquiries into the spatial qualities of color, Stuck’s influence still reverberates.