I Would Not Think To Touch The Sky With Two Arms

Franz von Stuck charted a turbulent territory of the interior, mining its opposing forces to reveal a portrait of the human psyche. Whereas others looked to a Classical past as a wistful imagining of an ideal, von Stuck excavated humankind’s universal nature and basest desires, uncloaking an ever-present Mythology thinly veiled by modernity. The erotic and spiritual, humor and despair, Eros and Thanatos—the Freudian life and death drives—all collide in an undulating communion of sensuality and foreboding. Within his works, myth and allegory are underpinnings of the mind, rather than an escape from the confines of any particular era or the self. And within the world he created, the bounds of myth and life, life and art are indistinct from one another. Von Stuck constructed a universe beyond the corners of his canvas, emblemized through the design of his home, Villa Stuck, in an act of pure Gesamtkunstwerk. Even his frames, typically the delineation between an artwork and its surroundings, were meticulously crafted for each work. His paintings live within a world envisioned solely for them, sometimes coming forth from the architecture to take their places upon easels, whose simple wooden form stood in stark contrast to the gilded ceilings and ornate decor. These same easels now stand as symbols of metamorphosis: a thread between the historic and the present day and an outline of the artwork’s becoming, its spirit still transforming even once completed. Across the decades and beyond the painted surfaces, details from his œuvre persist, permeating the subconscious of contemporary artists. These themes and imagery offer stylistic structure for some and an emotional framework for others: a pair of glowing eyes, alit with existential dread, their piercing stare emerging from the gates of Hell, here stand on their own, disembodied from the individual, voicing a collective consciousness. Or a profoundly human Pieta, an eye-level testament of Christ’s suffering and his mother’s grief, once again reconsidered; now Mary’s body is absent while Christ’s is repeated, a floating ascension that seizes a tormented psychological state as much as it captures an impression of divine resurrection. For other painters, a nearly spiritual merging of the archetypal and the personal sieves through the act of re-interpretation, emerging as an exaltation of common figures. Obsession possesses a distinct potential to lionize the mundane into legend. A mortal life’s seminal markers—youth, aspiration, motherhood, old age, mourning, death—unfurl as hybrid creatures or ambiguous silhouettes, as bodies retreat into the blank walls enclosing them or levitate from the ground, seeming, nonetheless, to infinitely plunge at the same time. The ecstasy and suffering of experience are alchemized as brushstrokes, echoing a macabre undertow, an inescapable pull of longing and nostalgia. Others yet unearth the embedded humor that flickers through somber psychological landscapes and the occasional dalliance from myth to fairy tale: the humble frog, an ancient symbol of fertility and renewal, once playfully recounted as a prince with crown in tow, emerges as seeping pigments on paper, the transformation from tadpole to final form liminal, luminous, and grotesque. An artistic totality connects each manifestation of creative expression like a ladder between planes, in which the sublime and its imagery coalesce as potent beauty in the here and now, melded with the mystery of human existence. It is likewise a totality that builds a world past the constraints of its own time, immortally prescient. How vividly this is conjured in von Stuck’s depiction of Cupid, the Roman god of love, impishly poised astride the back of an aging centaur, clutching a floral garland as reins. Poignant and comic, the pair trod upon an earthen terrain enclosed by a murky abyss, outside time and place. The polarity of the centaur (here a timeworn man marching toward the later part of his life) urged onward by the youthful force of Love (possibly in tandem, possibly subservient, at Cupid’s whims) encapsulates the inherent duality in von Stuck’s paintings. Man and horse, whether united as one mythical body, or depicted in partnership, symbolize a quest for youth and freedom as much as they are an emblem of humanity’s bestial impulses. Whether these subconscious desires safely ground or fully tether humans to a mortal existence remains open-ended; it is a mystery disclosed without offering an answer. Mythologies across cultures share a common theme of transformation; von Stuck transformed these mythologies to capture prevailing truths and desires. Now metamorphosed, his enduring vision once again extends past its frame, brought to life by a new generation of painters, each forging their own origin and retelling, with as much truth as there is magic. For the act of painting is itself an act of transfiguration: a means of materially uniting past with present and of rendering immortal what only exists upon a surface where nothing exists at all.