Quality eBooks in Multiple Formats
www.edwardandezra.com
Nestled between the Danube River and the Alps, Franz von Stuck was born in the Bavarian village of Tettenweis. With his dark suave Italian looks the young “Franzl” had an idyllic childhood. Father earned his livelihood as a miller, and mother was supportive particularly of her child’s fondness for drawing. She enrolled her son at the Kunstgewerbeschule at nearby Munich when Franzl was 15 years of age. Three years later Franz matriculated to the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. Franz later wrote that he was forced to provide himself a living while still maintaining his studies: “At the age of 17, when I finally had to fend for myself, I tried to earn money in a variety of ways. I drew cartoons for obscure, humorous magazines, designed pewter beer-mugs, painted plates, and so on”. The work was in the contemporary style of Neo-Renaissance which was the nationally declared style of Germany.
Between 1882 and 1884 several of Franz's drawings were published in Allegorien und Embleme. This book of emblematic designs provided craftsmen of varied disciplines with a wealth of models which they could copy freely. Unlike other artists displayed, Franz stretched the style from merely historicism. His illustrations excelled in dramatizing perspective while using an easy and natural line. Franz’s work won him the cover art of the book.
Franz hardly bothered to attend the Academy and regarded himself as self-taught at this point. By way of pastel and colored chalk Franz began expanding his work from black and white illustrations. Then, proudly presenting at the Munich Annual Exhibition, Franz displayed The Guardian of Paradise. “Crowds gathered before it, discussions broke out, and high above all the heads the guardian of paradise gazed into the distance, his muscular, bare arm holding a sword that descended glowing with flames”. The painting won the 26-year-old artist both a gold medal and a large sum of money. It did not belong to the traditional current of historical painting, nor to the popular genre depicting peasants called lederhosen painting. It was not naturalism or impressionism, Franz was closer to those “painters of the soul and the mind”: the Pre-Raphaelites or French Symbolism.
The explosions of paint behind the fiery sword are a reference to the sensory splendor of paradise. The transparency of the guardian's garment and the radiant halo around his head have the same unreal nature. The figure may appear to have been painted realistically from the model but in fact he has been transformed into the ideal of an androgynous youth, the embodiment of an angel raised above mankind. Biographer Franz Hermann Meissner described the combination of the technique and style. “Everything about it astonishes one: the superb painting technique, borrowed so brilliantly from Paris, with its dissolution of light, the play of light on the surface and the translucent body; the conquest of the contour through masterfully concealed drawing; the feeling for style that...recalls the elegance of Burne-Jones”.
Publicists and later biographers were keen to present Guardian of Paradise to the public as Franz’s very first oil painting in order to play up its genius. However, “My first oil painting” as the artist himself states was Wild Chase dated at the same time as Guardian of Paradise-around 1889.
Apocalyptic wild horses, pale ghostly figures, and the central figure of the hunter with his formidable spear and threatening hound is superbly balanced by a carefully constructed composition. The dynamic movement is increased by the perspective of extreme foreshortening.
Also to that same year is credited the painting Innocentia.
Her gaze so clear and straight, seeing so far,
A world entire in that so limpid gaze:
There love and Pain lie resting in a dream,
This poem excerpt by Stuck's friend and biographer Julius Bierbaum tributes the painting. The image is derived from the Christian iconography of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary and the white lily in her hand is a sign of purity. The subject here, however, is neither chaste nor pure but a young girl in her teens who is becoming aware of her sexuality. The dark brown, alluring eyes, the red lips and the breast just visible under the sheer blouse suggest the imminent end to her virginity. Here the symbol of puberty is presented: innocence will soon turn into lewdness.
www.edwardandezra.com
#ArtHistory #ArtAppreciation #ArtEducation