In his works, Franz von Stuck explores humanity's great narratives like hardly any other artist. The human being and his existence, becoming and ceasing, with all the psychological and emotional content that has shaped civilization from its beginnings, are at the center of his artistic interest. Franz von Stuck successfully immortalized these timeless themes in his paintings in a fascinating way, using figures he drew from ancient mythology, tales from the Old Testament, and other literary sources. Towards the end of the 19th century in particular, there was an atmosphere in Europe characterized by progressive modernity, mechanization, mechanization, and cultural refinement that marked both a climax and an endpoint. A morbid, decadent delight taken in the gruesome created an extreme emotional tension between motifs of beginning and end, paradise and the inferno. Stuck's playful fauns and mermaids reflect a joyful vitalism, whilst there were also depictions of existential threat. His figures are always archetypes, the type that contemporary psychology began to discover and which found expression in art and literature. In doing so, he probed the whole range of emotions that fill the human soul: Love, the tender intimacy of the family, playful eroticism, passion, longing, anger and aggression, fear and horror - making him a great storyteller who affects the viewer's psyche with great artistry and theatricality.

Thus he also allowed biblical figures to have the same significance as mythological figures without claiming religious authority. After he had attended the School of Applied Arts in Munich, Stuck initially made a name for himself as a draughtsman, working for the humorous magazine “Fliegende Blätter” in Munich from 1880 to 1887, and also provided light, entertaining material for various portfolios in form of allegories, emblems, maps and vignettes in Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque style. Small, harmless putti and cupids were still typical of his playfully erotic pictorial world. At the end of the 1880s, he began to explore oil painting and confidently entered the stage as a young 26-year-old artist with the large-format painting “Wächter des Paradieses" (Guardians of Paradise, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich). With this impressive angel surrounded by supernatural light, guarding the gate to paradise with a flaming sword, Stuck made his breakthrough in the exhibition at Munich's Glaspalast. The work was awarded the gold medal and was widely praised. The archangel Michael, the one responsible for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, is portrayed as a vigorous, erotically charged young man with features that reveal the young Stuck. What makes this painting so unique is the impressionistic style and the bright palette in combination with the traditional biblical subject interpreted in an entirely new way and outside its usual context. Alongside an equally monumental “Vertreibung aus dem Paradies” (“Expulsion from Paradise”, 1890, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), the figure of Eve, seduced by the serpent and now herself a seductress, subsequently became the most frequently painted and internationally most successful motif of "sin" in Stuck's career from 1890 onwards.
Towards the end of his career, Stuck revisited the archangel. In earlier depictions, the beautiful, defensive angel was a door opener for the young painter, but now he seems to stand on the threshold of a new era. Michael not only guards paradise, he also plunges the rebellious angel Lucifer into earthly exile, and finally, as the bellicose leader of God's army on Judgement Day, he enforces the judgments in the separation of good and evil. As a pictorial metaphor, the Last Judgement thus also corresponds to the dualistic worldview prevailing at the end of the 19th century. Against the backdrop of scientific findings and the controversial 'descent of man from the ape', the only criterion for distinguishing factors between man and animal was the free will and conscience that defined the essence of human beings - another motif that Stuck had already taken up in his paintings. After a war perceived as apocalyptic, the new approach to the archangel was not surprising. The visionary impulse for this kind of depiction can be found in the Revelation of John, where the arrival of an angel is described in the sixth trumpet: “He was enveloped in a cloud, and the rainbow was over his head. [..] He set his right foot on the sea and his left on the land and shouted as a lion roars.” (Rev 10:1-3) The darkening of the stars appears in the speech about the end times and his return, which Christ delivers on the Mount of Olives and which is rendered in powerful, impressive poetry in the Gospel: “For as the lightning shines as far as the west when it flares up in the east, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Mt 24:27); the “sun will be darkened, and the moon will not shine; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. [He will send forth his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” (Mt 24:29-31) Such visionary ideas have always inspired artists and provided fuel for Stuck's imagination. He also gave his archangel a golden suit of armor, as is often shown in the grandest depictions of the Last Judgement at its climax in the 15th century.
Stuck's vision of the last days oscillates between horror and hope for the dawn of a new, more just, and better time, which is essentially what the Last Judgement entails. The interpretations of end-time motifs such as the Last Judgement or the Flood that Stuck's former pupil Wassily Kandinsky made around 1911 are also positive visions of the dawn of a new age. They imagine the victory of a spiritual order over the material world, providing a key impulse for his turn toward abstraction. In doing so, he tied in with theosophical utopias of the future such as those of the well-known esotericist Helena Blavatsky, who announced the 21st century as an era in which “the earth will be a heaven compared to what it is today.” (Quoted from Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, Bern n.d., p. 43) Stuck may also have come into contact with such theosophical ideas; in any case, he was in contact with the main protagonist of Munich occultism and parapsychology, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. Scenarios of doom were a much-discussed topic in various disciplines, especially around the turn of the century. After the experience of war, the collapse of all previous certainties, and the reorganization of Europe, the apocalypse now seemed to be over. The end of an era and the beginning of a new century appear like a ferocious yet cleansing thunderstorm and at the same time as a future warning. Stuck presents the angel less as the herald of judgment than in his function as a caller to resurrection. Before the scientific discoveries on the creation of Earth and the evolution were made in the 19th century, the painting can also be read as a second creation story, beginning with the separation of land and water, in which electrical tensions are discharged under torrential rain and life crawls out of the primordial ooze. Like a painful birth, the figures emerging from Earth see the hopeful symbol of the rainbow, which appears here like an eternal circle of becoming and ceasing behind the golden angel. In a powerful symbolism, Stuck combines universal pictorial formulas detached from a religious context to create a statement that, in Stuck's own words, “only has the purely human, the eternally valid” (quoted from Exhib. cat. Sünde und Secession. Franz von Stuck in Wien, Vienna 2016, p. 90) in mind. [KT]