Die Tanzerin Saharet
Signature
signed, lower left: ‘FRANZ VON STUCK’
Provenance
Frederick Ludwig Herman, Berlin; by inheritance, his son
Ernest G. Herman (1917–2009), Berlin and Los Angeles by 1936
by descent to the current owner
Related literature
Claudia Gross-Roath, Das Frauenbild bei Franz von Stuck, Weimar, 1999, pp. 93–95, 305–07.
This seductive portrait by the leading German symbolist artist Franz von Stuck depicts the dancer known as Saharet (1879–1942). Presented in its original frame designed by the artist, the painting comes directly from the descendent of its first owner, who ran the famous printing business, H.S. Hermann & Co. in Berlin.
Saharet (fig. 1) is the stage name for the celebrated vaudeville dancer whose extraordinary flexibility earned her the sobriquet ‘the India-rubber lady’. Born in Australia of Eurasian heritage, her fame took off in the late 1890s as her dance career brought her to San Francisco, New York, Chicago, as well as major European cities. In 1899 she performed in Munich and became an instant sensation. The Malerfürst Franz von Lembach regularly engaged Saharet for portrait sittings (Frye Art Museum, Seattle, 1952.104). Also mad for her was the acclaimed writer Alfred Heymel, who published a poem declaring her a muse. She starred in several films between 1897 and 1914, including one as a Bolero dancer (1905).
In her 1999 study of Stuck’s women, Claudia Gross-Roath notes that the artist painted Saharet eight times, all with variation and within the first decade of the 1900s. The largest is a three-quarter length portrait in the Lembachhaus, Munich (G14259; fig. 2) dating to 1906. Wearing a bobbled spaghetti strap dress and a tasselled shawl, the dancer, in her Spanish costume, is presented with one arm akimbo and another holding up her hat to reveal her Biedermeyer style hairdo. Previously owned by Stuck’s important patron Friz von Frantius of Chicago, to whom Saharet was briefly married around this time, this portrait is in fact painted over an earlier version of a similar composition, as Frantzius revealed to Stuck’s early biographer Otto J. Bierbaum. More prevalent are bust-length portraits, such as the oil sketch on cardboard in the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (1952.164; fig. 3). The present work, which would be the nineth, most closely relates to a small oil sketch in the Landesmuseum Oldenberg (fig. 4), in which Saharet is represented at bust length, wearing a black hat over her loose brown curls, gazing directly at the viewer with her bedroom eyes.
One of the most important fin-de-siècle artists from Germany, Stuck founded the Munich Secession in 1892, predating the more famous Berlin and Vienna Secession movements, which was intended as a collective of artists who rejected the traditions of academic painting. He would influence the early career of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt among others. While Stuck is best known for his femme fatales and mythological scenes, it was also his interest to paint women in historic or stage costumes. Almost half of his painted oeuvre consists of portraiture, mostly of women. Just under two dozen female sitters (23) are identified, typically of friends, patrons, or women in art and theatre—for example, Tilla Durieux, Lisbeth Steckelberg, and Vera Starkoff (mother of the English art historian Francis Haskell, a dancer and feminist freethinker). Stuck’s portraits from the last two decades of his career are commissioned works, whereas his early portraits dating to around 1900 were preponderantly female studies, made for larger paintings or as model studies.
Besides painting, Stuck was an accomplished draftsman, illustrator, printmaker, sculptor, furniture maker and architect. He advocated the concept of gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art), by the cross-pollination of a variety of artistic practices. In practice, he designed many of the frames for his paintings. As with our work, the original Oberndorfer frame is intended to be seen as an extension of the painted surface.
Stuck fell out of favor in the English-speaking world following the two world wars. Interest in his works has returned, following his first retrospective at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2013, and the acquisition of Stuck’s major paintings by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Dallas Museum of Art, respectively in 2017 and 2023.
We are grateful to Margot Th. Brandlhuber, Head of Collections at Villa Stuck, Munich, for confirming the authenticity of this work based on a high-resolution photograph.