![]() ![]() His remarkable Dancers (1896) is one of his earlier paintings exploring images of dancing women. Von Stuck’s femmes were not just fatales, though. ![]() Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), Dancers (1896), further details not known. His furniture designs were recognised in the award of a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Paris, in 1900. He also started work on the design of his house, Villa Stuck, in Munich, which enabled him to exercise his wide range of skills, in its architecture, interior design and decoration, and to decorate the house with his own sculpture and paintings. In 1895, von Stuck accepted the position of professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he had studied. Von Stuck’s depiction of this popular story was probably influential on Fernand Khnopff‘s even more extraordinary painting of the Sphinx in the following year, 1896. It was not until Oedipus arrived and solved the riddle that its siege was ended – and his fate was hardly a reward, as he entered the city to fall in love with Queen Jocasta, who was actually his mother. The succession of those who failed in that task were killed by strangulation, their corpses littering the scene. It sat outside and refused to let anyone pass unless they answered its riddle correctly. These works show the Greek sphinx, a chimera of a woman’s head and chest with a body based on that of a lion, which effectively put the city of Thebes under siege. The Kiss of the Sphinx (1895) may well have been influenced by Gustave Moreau’s paintings of the sphinx, not just in his highly successful Oedipus and the Sphinx of 1864, but more particularly his later Triumphant Sphinx of 1886. These femmes fatales continued to appear in later paintings too. Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), The Kiss of the Sphinx (1895), oil on canvas, 160 x 144.8 cm, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary. This appears to be a reversed image of von Stuck’s Sensuality, with the serpent’s body passing between Eve’s legs and its head on her shoulder, the tongue flickering out in menace. There are other more overt versions elsewhere, including Sin from about the same time, now in a private collection. Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), Sin (c 1893), oil, dimensions not known, Private collection. The serpent’s coils are less obvious, but there’s no mistaking its head perched on her right shoulder. Eve now gives us a knowing look, much – but not too much – of her naked body peering out from the dark. This won him a gold medal at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that year. His most famous development of the image of Eve as femme fatale is this more restrained painting of Sin from 1893, now in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), Sin (1893), oil on canvas, 94.5 x 59.5 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. I suspect that Sigmund Freud had a field day analysing this print. The serpent has become an erotic object, its long body insinuating itself up between Eve’s legs, embracing her shoulders, and its head rests next to her face. ![]() The roots of this go back at least a few years, and are manifest in this etching of Sensuality from about 1889. In 1893, von Stuck’s paintings became dominated by images of a dark and sensual femme fatale, based largely on the figure of Eve. Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), Sensuality (c 1889), etching, 21.1 x 17 cm, location not known. Although even less well-known for his plastic art, he was also an architect and interior designer. This was also the year in which von Stuck made his first sculpture. By the start of the new century, painting and the other fine arts in central Europe had undergone revolutionary change. It was followed in 1897 by the Vienna Secession, in which Gustav Klimt was a major force, and in 1898 by the Berlin Secession, which included Lovis Corinth (again) and his wife Charlotte, Ferdinand Hodler, Walter Leistikow, Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, and Max Slevogt. The Munich Secession was the first in a series of art movements which swept the German-speaking countries at the end of the nineteenth century. They established their own association, and held their first exhibition the following year in Berlin. Together with Lovis Corinth and almost a hundred other artists, von Stuck resigned from the official Artists’ Association, which was opposed to Impressionism, Expressionism, and Symbolism. The Munich Secession, in 1892, was a watershed in von Stuck’s life and his art.
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