Background

Max Liebermann was born in Berlin on July 20, 1847, into an Ashkenazi Jewish merchant family; the second of four children of Louis Liebermann, a wealthy Jewish manufacturer, banker and councilor, and Philippine Liebermann (née Haller).

Education

Liebermann and his siblings attended a makeshift class in a Berlin Gymnasium where they were taught Latin and Greek. From the age of nine, Liebermann began to exhibit an interest in the arts. Although his parents tried to discourage him. Prompted by his parents, Liebermann enrolled at the University of Berlin to study Law and Philosophy. After being secretly taught by the painter Carl Steffeck from 1866 to 1868, he enrolled at the Weimar Art School where he studied painting and drawing from 1868 to 1872 - a period interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War.

Career

Between 1871 and 1875 Liebermann made three visits to the Netherlands, a country which appealed to him and to which he returned many times later. Liebermann started to paint as a realist, and the free brushwork of Frans Hals influenced him decisively.

Liebermann finished his first canvas in 1873 entitled Women Plucking Geese. The same year he settled in Paris, and his early contact with the Barbizon school (1874) made him an adherent of plein-air (open-air) painting. He moved to Munich in 1878 and in 1884 settled in Berlin, where he lived the rest of his life. He retained the Old Master touch with its subdued color scheme until 1890, and his genre scenes-pictures of people working and street and market themes-were strongly realistic.

Only after he discovered Édouard Manet did Liebermann's palette become lighter, but it never approached the brilliance of Claude Monet's or Pierre Auguste Renoir's. Liebermann's colorism remained more connected with German and French realist painting. The influence of Edgar Degas liberated his style as a draftsman and graphic artist, and finally Liebermann's own mature and personal style emerged in pictures of sporting events and riders on the beach, views of his garden in Wannsee, portraits of high society, and self-portraits.

In 1892 Liebermann founded the Malervereinigung XI, a predecessor of the Berlin Secession. His first retrospective exhibition was held in the Berlin Academy in 1897, to which he was elected a member in 1899. That same year he founded the Secession, whose chairman he remained until 1911. In 1920 he became president of the Berlin Academy of Arts and Letters; the Nazis removed him from this position in 1932.

Liebermann, who was also a resourceful and original writer on art theory and a personality of great charm and wit, was one of the first artists to be persecuted by the Nazis because of his religion. In 1933 he was forbidden to paint and to exhibit, and his pictures were removed from German public collections.

Achievements

• Liebermann is regarded by many as one of the most instrumental proponents of artistic and political modernism in Germany. He has been cited alongside Courbet, Monet, Manet and Degas as an important member of early modernism and Impressionism in Europe. Meanwhile, some of his most notable achievements have been in his role as a cultural spokesperson. His input had allowed Berlin to become an influential art hubs at the turn of the 20th century.
  
  Liebermann's work can be found in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris - and his villa in Wannsee was converted in 2006 into a museum which also holds exhibitions.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Sixteen years old

  • Amsterdam Orphans in the Garden

  • Man with parrots

  • Beer garden in Munchen

  • Portrait of Dr. Max Linde

  • Woman and Her Goats in the Dunes

  • The Terrace at the Restaurant Jacob in Nienstedten on the Elbe

  • Villa

  • Bathing boys

  • Dune near Nordwijk with Child

  • Parrot caretaker in Artis

  • Portrait of Mrs. Irene Triesch

  • Bathing Boys

  • Amsterdam Orphanage

  • Boys Bathing with Beach Warden

  • Portrait of the publisher Bruno Cassirer

  • A Hunter in the Dunes

  • Portrait of Wilhelm Bode

  • View of the Roofs of Florence

  • The farmer

  • Shoemaker

  • Portrait of Otto Braun

  • Portrait of Professor Sauerbruch

  • Jewish quarter in Amsterdam

  • Lumberjack in the forest

  • Bethmann Hollweg

  • Self-Portrait with Brush

  • On the Way to School in Edam

  • Free hour at Amsterdam orphanage

  • Birch grow

  • Sewing school

  • Portrait of Miss Hedwig Ruetz

  • Drinking cow

  • Restaurant De oude Vink

  • Birch grow

  • Walther Nernst

  • Self-portrait

  • Terrace overlooking the flower garden in Wannsee

  • Tennis Game by the Sea

  • Portrait of Professor Dr. Carl Bernstein

  • Potato gatherers

  • Spinning Workshop in Laren

  • The Yacht Race

  • Carl Duisberg

  • Ulrich von Wilamowitz Moellendorff

  • Spinner

  • Parrot avenue

  • Portrait of Richard Strauss

  • Rider on the Beach Facing Left

  • Self-Portrait

  • The Fisherman

  • Horse races

  • Children Bathing in the Sea

  • Portrait of Constantin Meunier

  • Portrait of Eugen Gutmann

  • Women plucking geese

  • Man with horse

  • Self-Portrait with palette

  • Swimming boys

  • Samson and Delilah

Views

Quotations: "In these difficult times, the feeling of solidarity with my Jewish co-religionists is doubly gratifying and comforting in view of the deprivation of rights with which German Jews are now forced to live."

"Whenever I see a Frans Hals, I feel the desire to paint; but when I see a Rembrandt, I want to give it up."

"Like a horrible nightmare, the abrogation of equal rights weighs upon us all, but especially upon those Jews who, like me, had surrendered themselves to the dream of assimilation."

"It is my conviction that art has nothing to do with politics or dissent."

Membership

Liebermann was one of the founders of the Berlin Secession, a group formed in protest against the conservative ideas of the Association of Berlin Artists. As its president, Liebermann helped make the Secession the most progressive producer of exhibitions in the German art world. He pushed for the right of artists to do their own thing, unconcerned with politics or ideology, and his interest in French Realism went against conservatives who viewed it as an offensive incursion that smacked of Jewish cosmopolitanism.

The artist was also a member of the Berlin Academy. Indeed, in 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War, he was elected President of the Academy, remaining a member until Jewish artists were banned in 1933.

• Chairman

  Berlin Secession , Germany

  1898 - 1911

• member

  Berlin Secession , Germany

  1892 - 1911

• member

  Berlin Academy , Germany

  1899 - 1933

• President

  Berlin Academy , Germany

  1920 - 1933

Personality

Liebermann was a passionate defender and collector of French modernism at a time when deep-seated anti-French sentiments in Prussia branded enthusiasm for French culture as antipatriotic.

Interests

• Artists

  Jean-Francois Millet, Adolph Menzel, Edouard Manet, Franz von Lenbach, Edgar Degas

Connections

Max Liebermann was married in 1884 to Martha Marckwald. They parented one child, Marianne Henriette Käthe, in 1885.

Father:

Louis Liebermann

Mother:

Philippine Liebermann

Spouse:

Martha Marckwald

Daughter:

Käthe Liebermann

tutor:

Carl Steffeck

References

• Max Liebermann
  1953
• Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism
  2005
• Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany
  2016
• Max Liebermann and International Modernism: An Artist's Career from Empire to Third Reich
  2011