The number of Stuck's pupils who achieved great success served to enhance the teacher's own fame. Yet by the time of his death, Stuck's importance as an artist in his own right had almost been forgotten: his art seemed old-fashioned and irrelevant to a generation which had endured World War I. Stuck's reputation languished until the late 1960s when a renewed interest in Art Nouveau brought him to attention once more. In 1968 the Villa Stuck was opened to the public; it is now a museum.
In Robert Waite's book The Psychopathic God: Adolph Hitler and numerous other sources it is noted that Franz Stuck was Hitler's favorite painter from childhood on.
In this connection it is worth noting that Stuck made frequent use of the image of a woman wrapped by a serpent, a bondage image; Hitler was well known to be attracted to images of women in confinement.[citation needed] A British Intelligence report compiled on him noted that he appeared to only enjoy circus acts if they involved situations where a woman appeared to be in peril.[citation needed]
Stuck's works were never admitted to the Great German Art Exhibit.[citation needed]
One of Stuck's best-known paintings The Wild Chase depicts Wotan (Odin) on horseback leading a procession of the dead. It was completed about 1889, the year of Hitler's birth, and it has acquired a kind of semi-legendary status as the face of Wotan in the painting greatly resembles Hitler's.[citation needed]
Stuck's paintings were mentioned by Carl Jung, who wrote: