Franz von Stuck Prints

About Franz von Stuck

Franz Stuck was born in 1863 at Tettenweis, near Passau in Lower Bavaria, and moved to Munich in 1878, where he lived for the rest of his life. He studied at the Munich Academy from 1881 to 1885 and first became known for cartoons in the magazine Fliegende Blätter and for decorative vignettes. His first paintings, shown at the Munich Glass Palace in 1889, won a gold medal for The Guardian of Paradise, and Lucifer followed in 1890. In 1892 he co-founded the Munich Secession, and in 1893 The Sin made him famous; the same year he won a gold medal at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. From 1895 he taught painting at the Munich Academy, where his students included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers. In 1897 he married Mary Lindpainter and designed the Villa Stuck, down to its furniture, which won a gold medal in Paris in 1900. Ennobled in 1905, he was known thereafter as von Stuck. His mythological style fell out of fashion after the First World War, and he died in Munich in 1928; the Villa Stuck opened as a museum in 1968. Stuck's paintings set large, sculptural figures against dark grounds and were often made with frames he designed himself, so the glowing bodies seem to step out of the shadows.