Die Sünde

Though he was a professor at Munich’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste, the art of Franz von Stuck marked a departure from both the Academic and Realist styles that had dominated European art during the second half of the 19th century. ‘When choosing my subject matter, I seek to render only the purely human, the eternally valid,’ said the artist in an interview in 1892, and overarching themes of Stuck’s work include preoccupations with love, lust, violence and chaos, often explored through a mythological or allegorical lens. The darkness, drama and overt eroticism found in Stuck’s work are a reflection of the intellectual preoccupations of the European avant-garde during his lifetime, and his work is an important precursor to the work of artists like Edvard Munch and Gustav Klimt, and to the later Surrealist and nonobjective artists as well.
Die Sünde is not only one of the most iconic compositions in von Stuck’s oeuvre, but has also become an icon of the broader Symbolist movement in its own right. When the artist’s first version of the subject (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) was displayed at the first exhibition of the Munich Secession in 1893, it caused a sensation. Its purchase and immediate installation at the Neue Pinakothek exposed the work to an even wider audience, many of whom made a special trip to the museum to see the infamous painting. The poet and novelist Hans Carossa described such a trip, saying, 'The fame of the painting drove us through the galleries; we stopped nowhere else and opened our eyes for the first time when we were finally standing opposite it…There are works of art that strengthen our sense of community, and there are others that seduce us into isolation. Stuck's painting belonged to the latter group' (H. Carossa, ‘Das Jahr der schönen Täuschungen,‘ Gesammelte Werke, vol. II, Leipzig, 1949, p. 295-96). Given the work’s power and popularity, it is no surprise that Stuck produced some 12 painted versions of the composition, as well as creating further versions in pastel, like the present work.
Stuck’s art is clearly a product of the German intellectual milieu in which he lived. Like the artist himself, many of his contemporaries, including Richard Wagner, Sigmund Freud, and particularly Friedrich Nietzsche were interested in exploring spiritual and psychological extremes, as well as rejecting society’s moral, religious and spiritual constructs. Much of this was captured in an interest in dichotomies; ideas expressed in terms of perpetually opposing forces – Male/Female, Conscious/Unconscious, Sacred/Profane – are a defining characteristic of European intellectual thought at the turn of the century. In Die Sünde von Stuck provocatively contrasts the sacred and the profane, fusing the theological doctrine of the Fall of Man with a starkly erotic depiction of the figure of Eve.
Her face is cast in shadow but her arrestingly direct eye contact pierces through the veil of darkness, drawing the viewer toward her. Light illuminates her naked torso, where just above her right breast the head of the snake draped around her body also stares directly out at the viewer, its fangs menacingly bared. Stuck’s figure is the embodiment of the femme fatale – her forthright sexuality draws in the viewer, while the snake’s looming presence makes clear that to be seduced by her is also to be destroyed. By not including the apple to allude directly to the biblical story, it is clear that von Stuck understood this figure as a physical embodiment of sin– a human archetype offering not knowledge as in the Fall, but instead offering the viewer sin its–or her–self. It is particularly striking that in this pastel, Stuck renders Die Sünde using exclusively black and white pastels, unlike the painted versions which incorporate more color; the dichotomy between light and dark is made manifest in his execution. The blue of the figure’s skin is in fact the color of the paper which Stuck allows to show through, adding to her haunting yet seductive presence.
Stuck’s success during the 1890s and first decade of the new century as a result of the popularity of Die Sünde was such that he was able to construct a palatial villa in Munich, which is now a museum dedicated to his work. A designer, sculptor, and illustrator in addition to a painter, he created architectural plans and designed decorative elements for the villa, which was intended as a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which all the elements form a perfect whole. The richly ornamented interior integrates Stuck’s paintings and sculptures into a setting inspired by the art of ancient Greece and Rome which was so often his subject matter. The spiritual centerpiece of von Stuck’s home is the artist’s Künstleraltar, located in his studio, above which still hangs one of the painted versions of Die Sünde, the artist’s icon and lodestar.
Though by the beginning of the First World War Stuck’s signature style would come to be regarded as excessive and vulgar, his interest in extreme emotional states and his expressive manipulation of color, space, and form were eminently modern and would ultimately come to be seen as an important step toward the development of 20th century art. There are clear parallels to be drawn between Stuck’s work and that of his contemporary Gustav Klimt, the Expressionism of Edvard Munch and Max Beckmann, and even further to the pathos-filled and dream-like subject matter of the Surrealists, like René Magritte. For much of the last century art historians disregarded Stuck’s work, and Symbolism generally, as an aberration in the narrative which connects 19th and 20th century painting, but recent studies have finally begun to acknowledge the innovation and importance of Munich’s ‘painter price,’ in the development of modern art, work which continues to present day.