Max Liebermann (20 July 1847 – 8 February 1935) was a German painter and printmaker, and one of the leading proponents of Impressionism in Germany and continental Europe. In addition to his activity as an artist, he also assembled an important collection of French Impressionist works.

The son of a Jewish banker, Liebermann studied art in Weimar, Paris, and the Netherlands. After living and working for some time in Munich, he returned to Berlin in 1884, where he remained for the rest of his life. He later chose scenes of the bourgeoisie, as well as aspects of his garden near Lake Wannsee, as motifs for his paintings. Noted for his portraits, he did more than 200 commissioned ones over the years, including of Albert Einstein and Paul von Hindenburg. The family attended church services in the reform community and increasingly turned away from the more orthodox way of life of their grandfather. Although the Liebermanns' house had large salons and numerous bedrooms, the parents encouraged their three sons to sleep in a common room. This was also provided with a glass window in the wall so that the schoolwork could be supervised from outside.

When Louis Liebermann commissioned his wife to paint an oil painting in 1859, Max Liebermann accompanied his mother to the painter . Out of boredom, he asked for a pen and began to draw. Even as an old woman, Antonie Volkmar was proud to have discovered Liebermann. His parents were not enthusiastic about painting, but at least in this case their son did not refuse to attend schools. On his afternoons off school, Max received private painting lessons from Eduard Holbein and Carl Steffeck.

In the family, Max was not considered particularly intelligent. At school, his mind often wandered, and he gave inappropriate answers to questions his teachers asked him. This resulted in teasing from classmates which became unbearable for him, so that he took refuge several times in supposed illnesses. His parents showed him affection and support, but he was aware of their greater regard for his older, more "sensible" brother Georg. Max's talent for drawing did not mean much to his parents: When his works were first published, the father forbade the 13-year-old from signing the name Liebermann on them.

As a secondary school, Louis Liebermann chose the Friedrichwerdersche Gymnasium for his sons, where the sons of Bismarck had studied. In 1862, 15-year-old Max attended an event by the young socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, whose passionate ideas fascinated the millionaire's son. In 1866 Max Liebermann graduated from high school.

Student life and early works

After graduating from high school, Liebermann enrolled at the Friedrich Wilhelm University. He chose chemistry, in which his cousin Carl Liebermann had also been successful. The chemistry course served as a pretext to be able to devote himself to art. Instead of attending the lectures, he rode out in the zoo and painted. At Carl Steffeck, he was also and allowed to perform assistant tasks more and more frequently in the design of monumental battle pictures. but a buyer was found in the railway magnate Bethel Henry Strousberg. Liebermann had found his first style: realistic and unsentimental depiction of working people, without condescending pity or romanticism.

In 1873 Liebermann saw farmers harvesting beets at the gates of Weimar. He decided to capture this motif in oil, but when Karl Gussow cynically advised him not to paint the picture, Liebermann scratched it from the canvas. He felt powerless and without drive. Liebermann decided to visit the famous history and salon painter Hans Makart in Vienna, where he stayed for only two days. Instead, he was determined to turn his back on Germany and its art scene, which Liebermann regarded at the time as backward and outdated.

Paris, Barbizon and Amsterdam

In December 1873 Liebermann moved to Paris and set up a studio in Montmartre. In the world capital of art, he wanted to make contacts with leading realists and impressionists. But the French painters refused to have any contact with the German Liebermann. In 1874 he submitted his goose plucking to the Salon de Paris, where the picture was accepted but received negative reviews in the press, especially from a nationalist point of view. Liebermann first spent the summer of 1874 in Barbizon, near the Forest of Fontainebleau. "Munkácsy attracted me a lot, but Troyon, Daubigny, Corot and above all Millet did even more." In Berlin, the court preacher Adolf Stoecker continued the antisemitic debate about the painting. A few important artist colleagues took his side, including Wilhelm Leibl. for decades the overpainting was not discovered until 1993. The discovery of the overpainting initiated an intensive discussion about the reasons for Liebermann's choice of a historical subject (coined since centuries by the Christian iconography) in view of the growing antisemitism, as well as Liebermann's own relationship to Judaism.

thumb|The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple, 1879, original version, as reproduced in Muther's publication

From that time on, Liebermann was a famous artist, but his painterly advances came to a standstill during his stay in Holland in 1879: The light in a view of a rural village street that was created at that time appears pale and unnatural. In 1880 he took part in the Paris Salon. The pictures that were shown there had one thing in common: the representation of people working peacefully side by side in a harmonious community. Liebermann did not find the mood shown in the surroundings of Munich, which was heated up by antisemitic hostility, but tried to absorb it in his annual stays in the Netherlands. In 1879 he also traveled to the Dachauer Moos, Rosenheim and the Inn Valley for painting stays, where his painting Brannenburger Biergarten was created.

Netherlands

thumb|[[Recreation Time in the Amsterdam Orphanage, 1881–82]]

In the summer of 1880, Liebermann traveled to the Brabant village of Dongen. There studies emerged that he later used for his painting Schusterwerkstatt. After completing this work, he traveled once more to Amsterdam before returning to Munich. Something happened there that "decided his artistic career". He glanced into the garden of the Catholic old man's house, where elderly men in black were sitting on benches in the sunlight. About this moment, Liebermann later said: "It was as if someone were walking on a level path and suddenly stepped on a spiral spring that sprang up". He began to paint the motif, and for the first time used the effect of the light filtered through a canopy (or other barriers), the later so-called "Liebermann's sunspots", that is, the selective representation of (partially) self-colored light to create an atmospheric atmosphere. This prefigured Liebermann's late Impressionist work, which has been compared to the work of Renoir.

At the Paris Salon in 1880 "he was the first German to receive an honorable mention for this work". In addition, Léon Maître, an important Impressionist collector, acquired several paintings by Liebermann. Encouraged by the longed-for success, he turned to an earlier topic: Using older studies, he composed Recreation Time in the Amsterdam Orphanage (1881–82), also with "sunspots".

In the fall, Liebermann traveled again to Dongen to complete the Shoemaker's Workshop there. In this work, too, his clear turn to light painting is manifested, but at the same time he remained true to his earlier work depictions by continuing to dispense with transfigurative, romantic elements. The Shoemaker's Workshop and Recreation Time in the Amsterdam Orphanage found a buyer in Jean-Baptiste Faure in the Paris Salon in 1882. The French press celebrated him as an impressionist. The collector Ernest Hoschedé wrote enthusiastically to Édouard Manet: "If it is you, my dear Manet, who revealed the secrets of the open air to us, Liebermann knows how to listen to the light in an enclosed space." who was the sister of his sister-in-law. The wedding ceremony took place on 14 September after the move from Munich to Berlin had been completed. The couple lived together for the first time, In den Zelten 11, on the northern edge of the zoo. However, the honeymoon did not lead to Italy, as was customary at the time, but via Braunschweig and Wiesbaden to Scheveningen in Holland. There Jozef Israëls joined the two; together they traveled to Laren, where Liebermann met the painter Anton Mauve. Further stops on the trip were Delden, Haarlem and Amsterdam. Liebermann produced studies everywhere and collected ideas that largely filled him up in the years that followed.

After his return he was accepted into the Association of Berlin Artists. Anton von Werner, his later adversary, also voted for his admission. In August 1885 Liebermann's only daughter was born, who was given the name "Marianne Henriette Käthe", but was only called Käthe. He painted little during this time, as he devoted himself entirely to the role of father.

Carl and Felicie Bernstein lived across from the Liebermann family. At his exceptionally cultivated neighbors, Liebermann saw paintings by Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, which accompanied him throughout his subsequent life. In addition, he was able to feel for the first time in their circle as an accepted member of the Berlin artist community: Max Klinger, Adolph Menzel, Georg Brandes and Wilhelm Bode came and went there as well as Theodor Mommsen, Ernst Curtius and Alfred Lichtwark. The latter, the director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, recognized Liebermann's Impressionist potential early on. His entry into the Society of Friends also made it easier to achieve social acceptance in the bourgeois upper class.

After eight years of absence from Berlin, Liebermann took part in the exhibition of the Academy of the Arts again for the first time in 1886. For the exhibition he selected the paintings Freetime in the Amsterdam Orphanage, Altmannhaus in Amsterdam and The Grace, which depicts a Dutch peasant family praying in a gloomy, atmospheric setting and which was painted at the suggestion of Jozef Israël. The "opinion maker" Ludwig Pietsch described Liebermann as a great talent and an outstanding representative of modernism.

In the summer of 1886, Martha Liebermann went to Bad Homburg vor der Höhe for a cure with her daughter, which gave her husband the opportunity to study in Holland. He returned to Laren, where flax was made from raw linen in peasant cottages. Impressed by the subject of the collaborative work, Liebermann began to draw sketches and paint a first version in oil. In his Berlin studio he composed the studies for a painting in larger format, on which he was able to complete work in the spring of 1887. The representation of collective work should show the "heroically patient" in everyday life.

In May 1887 the picture was exhibited at the Paris Salon, where it was received with only muted applause. At the international anniversary exhibition in Munich, a critic described the painting as "the real representation of dull infirmity caused by a monotony of hard work. […] Peasant women in worn aprons and wooden slippers, with faces that hardly show that they were young, the features of grim old age, lie in the chamber, the beams of which are oppressively weighed down, their mechanical daily work." Adolph Menzel, on the other hand praised the picture and described the painter as "the only one who makes people and not models".

At this time, the art critic Emil Heilbut published a "study on naturalism and Max Liebermann", in which he described the painter as "the bravest forerunner of the new art in Germany".

The secession crisis

thumb|Terrace in the Garden near the Wannsee towards Northwest, 1916

Liebermann was the president of the Berlin Secession from its beginning in 1898.

thumb|left|Portrait of President [[Paul von Hindenburg, 1927]]

The city of Berlin granted him honorary citizenship, which, however, was heatedly contested in the city council. On his birthday, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg honored Liebermann with the eagle shield of the German Reich "as a token of the thanks that the German people owe you". Interior Minister Walter von Keudell presented him with the Golden State Medal embossed with "For services to the state". At the end of 1927, Liebermann portrayed President Hindenburg. Although he did not confess to him politically, he gladly accepted the assignment and felt it was a further honor. The portrait sessions of their peers were characterized by mutual respect and a certain amount of sympathy. In Hindenburg, the "old master of German modernism" saw a veteran Prussian patriot who could not possibly derail into irrationality. Liebermann wrote: "The other day a Hitler paper wrote – it was sent to me – that it would be unheard of for a Jew to paint the Reich President. I can only laugh at something like that. I'm convinced that when Hindenburg finds out, he'll laugh about it too. I'm just a painter, and what does painting have to do with Judaism?" The writer Paul Eipper held his "studio talks" about his meeting with Liebermann on 25 March 1930 in his house on Pariser Platz in Berlin firmly: "We're talking about Hindenburg. He (Liebermann) is enthusiastic about him."

On 7 May 1933 Liebermann resigned from his honorary presidency, senatorial posts and membership in the Prussian Academy of the Arts, explaining to the press: "During my long life I have tried, with all my might, to serve German art. In my opinion, art has nothing to do with politics or ancestry. I can no longer belong to the Prussian Academy of the Arts...since my point of view is no longer valued." The death mask was made by Arno Breker, who was Hitler's preferred sculptor during this time. The photographer Charlotte Rohrbach took the plaster mask.

His death was not covered in the media, which had already been brought into line, and was only mentioned in passing – if at all. The Academy of Arts, which in the meantime had become an instrument of the National Socialists, refused to honor the former president. For example, no official representative appeared at his funeral at the Schönhauser Allee Jewish cemetery on 11 February 1935 – neither from the academy nor from the city, of which he had been an honorary citizen since 1927. The Gestapo had even forbidden participation in the funeral in advance, fearing that it might turn into a demonstration for artistic freedom. Nevertheless, almost 100 friends and relatives came. Among the mourners were Käthe Kollwitz, Hans Purrmann and his wife Mathilde Vollmoeller-Purrmann, Konrad von Kardorff, Leo Klein von Diepold, Otto Nagel, Ferdinand Sauerbruch with his son Hans Sauerbruch, Bruno Cassirer, Georg Kolbe, Max J. Friedländer, Friedrich Sarre and Adolph Goldschmidt. According to Saul Friedländer, only three "Aryan" artists attended the funeral. Both Liebermann and many of his collectors were persecuted by the Nazis and their agents because they were Jewish. Artworks were stolen from his Jewish collectors and many have never been recovered. Liebermann's own extensive collection, which he bequeathed to his wife, Martha, after his death, was later looted from her apartment. Martha committed suicide in 1943 after she learned she was going to be deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. About six months later, the Gestapo confiscated most of Liebermann's famous private art collection. The Palais Liebermann on Pariser Platz soon sank in ruins.

The German Lost Art Foundation lists hundreds of artworks that were either created by or owned by Max Liebermann in its official Lost Art database.

Claims for restitution for Nazi-looted art have been filed by both Max Liebermann's heirs and the heirs of his Jewish patrons whose collections were looted.

The Liebermann family has been trying to recover a portrait of Martha Liebermann that was on a Gestapo list of objects seized from her apartment for years.

When the art hoard of the son of Hitler's art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt was discovered in Munich in 2013, one of the first artworks to be proven to have been looted by the Nazis was Liebermann's Two Riders on the Beach that had belonged to the Jewish collector David Friedmann.

Max Silberberg, the famous Jewish art collector from Breslau who was murdered in Auschwitz had several artworks by Liebermann that were looted by the Nazis. Some have been restituted.

Commemoration

In 2005/2006, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the Jewish Museum in New York mounted the first major museum exhibition in the United States of Liebermann's work. The artist's wife, Martha Liebermann, was forced to sell the villa in 1940. On 5 March 1943, at the age of 85 and bedridden from a stroke, she was notified to get ready for deportation to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Instead, she committed suicide in the family home, Haus Liebermann, hours before police arrived to take her away. There is a stolperstein for her in front of their former home by the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

From 28 February–7 June 2026 the Museum Barberini exhibited Avant-Garde: Max Liebermann and Impressionism in Germany exploring his impact on German Impressionism. The catalog was edited by Michael Philipp, Nerina Santorius, Ortrud Westheider, and Daniel Zamani. ()

<gallery heights="140" perrow="6">

File:Die Rasenbleiche.jpg|Bleaching on the Lawn, 1892

File:Le jardin de l'orphelinat de M. Liebermann (MAMC, Strasbourg) (28827506060).jpg|The Garden of the Orphanage in Amsterdam, 1894

File:Max Liebermann Boys Bathing.jpg|Boys Bathing, 1898

File:Max Liebermann Reitesel 1900.jpg|Riding Donkey at the Seashore, 1900

File:Max Liebermann - Zwei Reiter am Strand.jpg|Two Riders on the Beach, 1901

File:Liebermann1902Jacobterrasse.jpg|Restaurant Terrace in Nienstedten, 1902

File:Das Atelier des Künstlers.jpg|The Artist's Studio, 1902

File:1902 Liebermann Simson und Delia anagoria.JPG|Samson and Delilah, 1902

File:Max Liebermann Portrait Otto Gerstenberg.jpg|Portrait of Otto Gerstenberg, 1919

</gallery>

References

  • 3 artworks by Max Liebermann at the Ben Uri site
  • German masters of the nineteenth century: paintings and drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany, a full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on Max Liebermann (no. 50–55)
  • Gallery of Liebermann's paintings at zeno.org
  • Guide to the Max Liebermann Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.