Franz von Stuck, the co-founder of the Munich Secession, made two variants of his Portrait of Beethoven, one based on the composer's death mask and the other on the life-mask which was taken by Franz Klein in 1812. The present version shows the composer crowned with laurels, his eyes closed, his face a deathly white, whilst the more often seen 'life version' shows Beethoven with his eyes wide open and with a full head of hair. The latter type is known in examples such as that in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and another formerly in the Baldhamer collects ion (sold in these rooms on 17 June 1986, lot 62) and subsequently in the collects ion of Joey and Toby Tanenbaum (sold Replica Shoes 's, New York, 26 May 1994, lot 130), and another sold in these rooms as lot 173 on 5 December 2012 (fig. 1). The iconography of the present plaster is identical to Stuck's painting illustrated in the 1908 monograph by Bierbaum (op. cit., p. 96). Both plaster versions have the same vibrant red background and gilded egg and dart frame.
The contrast between Beethoven's three-dimensional head and the surrounding plane from which it emerges in both versions is indebted to Arnold Böcklin's powerful polychrome papier mâché Shield with the Head of Medusa the first example of which dates to 1885 (see lot 9 in this sale and a version sold in these rooms on 14 November 2007, lot 253, to the Musée d'Orsay). In both cases the antithesis between portrait head and ground is heightened by the bichromatic juxtaposition between the pale face and the surrounding field of one dark colour.
The veneration of Beethoven amongst the artists of the fin-de-siècle reached its apex with the exhibition of the Vienna Secession in 1902 (the 75th anniversary of his death), which was entirely dedicated to the great composer. On that occasion Max Klinger unveiled his large polychrome Monument to Ludwig van Beethoven (Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste), which he had been working on since the 1880s, and Gustav Klimt painted the Beethoven Frieze, a visualisation of the composer's Ninth Symphony as interpreted by Richard Wagner, with strong Freudian undertones.
RELATED LITERATURE
O. J. Bierbaum, Stuck, Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1908, pp. 96 and 145; Masques de Carpeaux à Picasso, exh. cat. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 2009, pp. 148-152 & 240, cat. 140