Wounded Amazon

As both a founder of the Munich Secession and an influential teacher at the city’s Royal Academy (where his students included Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky), Franz von Stuck was a central figure in Munich’s art world at the turn of the twentieth century. His modern interpretation of the antique in works such as this painting brought him particular success.

Wounded Amazon depicts a battle between Amazons and centaurs; the particular subject is not found in classical mythology but is of the artist’s own invention. Though he was clearly influenced by the antiquities in Munich’s Glyptothek museum, Stuck based the painting on photographic studies of a model posed in his studio. Ever since he had featured the goddess Athena on the poster for the first Munich Secession exhibition in 1893, classical female warriors had appeared in his work as symbols of the new art.

There are two other versions of this painting, and the artist eventually produced three life-sized sculptures of the subject. One was installed outside Villa Stuck, the home he had designed for himself in Munich.