Stanislaus Stückgold

Stanislaus Stückgold was born in Warsaw in 1868 as the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant. It was only as a late career that he came to painting at the age of 38. After an international career as a chemist and engineer as well as revolutionary-political commitment to the liberation of Poland from Russian control, including arrest and imprisonment, he studied again, first sculpture in Warsaw, and from 1907 painting in Munich with Simon Hollósy as well as his painters’ colony in Nagybánya in Hungary. In 1908 Stückgold moved to Paris, became a student of Henri Matisse, met Henri Rousseau and exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in 1909. From 1913 to 1923 Stückgold lived in Munich, where in the meantime he ran his own painting school. Marianne von Werefkin arranged an exhibition for him at the renowned Galerie Hans Goltz, and through Herwarth Walden he participated in the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin, where August Macke and Franz Marc became aware of him. From 1923 he lived in Paris until his death in 1926. Stückgold’s oeuvre includes sensitively characterising portraits, including those of Albert Einstein and Else Lasker-Schüler, as well as brightly coloured landscapes and flower paintings that show his artistic independence despite the clear influence of his teacher Matisse.