Art Knowledge News
Max Liebermann At The Jewish Museum |
 |
 |
| Monday, 20 February 2006 21:44 |
 NEW YORK– For the first time in the United States the art and life of the influential Berlin painter, Max Liebermann (1847-1935), once counted among Germany’s foremost cultural figures, will be featured in a major museum exhibition. The Jewish Museum will present Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism from March 10 through July 30, 2006. Forty-six of the artist’s paintings will be on view, the majority of which will be new to American audiences. The exhibition spans the stylistic and thematic phases of Liebermann’s prolific career, from his renowned Realist interpretations of Dutch peasant life to his singular approach to Impressionism. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue examine the relationship between his art and the changing social and political climate in Berlin from the late 1880s until the Nazis seized power in 1933, and Liebermann’s role as a cultural leader introducing modernism, primarily French modern art, to Germany. Organized by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, The Jewish Museum in New York City is the exhibition’s only other venue.
 Max Liebermann, born into a wealthy German Jewish family, was well-known not only for his art but for his robust leadership in the cultural life of Berlin. He served as president of the Berlin Secession from 1898 until 1910 and was ultimately honored with the presidency of the Prussian Academy of Art from 1920 through 1932, during the Weimar Republic. Attaining such a position of civic authority was possible for a Jew only during this brief democratic period of German history. Upon Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power, however, Liebermann was forced to resign from this distinguished post. During the Nazi era, many of Liebermann’s paintings were removed from view in German museums and his contributions to modern German culture were denigrated. Max Liebermann lived throughout the period of German liberalism, from the social reforms that ushered in bourgeois democracy to the rise of the Third Reich that extinguished it. Guided by principles of equality, Liebermann’s early naturalist works revised German genre painting, as they depicted the virtues of labor and a dignified working class. Liebermann’s identification with the working class, through the edifying virtue of labor, reflected the widespread phenomenon in the latter half of the nineteenth century of the Jewish community’s attainment of Bildung, or high culture. Thus endowed, Jews could feel certain of their full citizenry within the German nation. As a descendant of a family of cotton manufacturers, Liebermann was not supposed to become an artist, much less an outspoken cultural dissident. He challenged the retrograde official state art sanctioned by the government and insisted on the straightforward presentation of rural peasantry and members of the working class. Such naturalist paintings brought him instant notoriety as the “painter of filth” and “apostle of ugliness.” In search of his voice throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the artist gradually appropriated foreign influences – notably the work of the Hague School, the Dutch counterpart of the French Barbizon School, which he had studied after traveling to Paris in 1872. The cosmopolitan Liebermann created a hybrid brand of naturalism from these two cultural strands of realism. He also drew on the freedom and immediacy of seventeenth-century Dutch painters like Franz Hals. As he blended these diverse cultural influences, Liebermann highlighted the qualities of communal harmony and productivity that had attracted him to these schools. His preoccupation with scenes of social equality came at a time when democratic reforms were disputed in Germany. Despite the obvious debt his early realist paintings owe to influences as diverse as Gustave Courbet and the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy, Liebermann’s portrayals of labor reflect his own equivocal and tenuous place as a Jew in Germany. Liebermann’s assimilation and his role as emissary of new art made him possibly the first significant fully emancipated German Jewish artist. The exhibition reveals the artist’s evolution from naturalist depictions of peasant labor to upper-middle-class leisure scenes and portraiture to Impressionist gardenscapes at Wannsee, Liebermann’s summer retreat in an elegant suburb of Berlin. The presence and inevitable decay of the fragile democratic social values and principles that initially guided him are reflected throughout his work in the tension between the freedom of the artist’s brush and the solidity of space. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Liebermann’s cultural stature was finally acknowledged. In 1896 the German government allowed him to accept the French Legion of Honor, which he had been forced to reject earlier in his career. The following year, the annual salon celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a retrospective and he was awarded the gold medal and the title of professor. In 1898 he was elected to the Royal Academy. As Liebermann began to celebrate his fame, he produced many self-portraits and also assumed the role of the genteel painter accepting portrait commissions of the cultural and political elite. He also chose to portray colorful leisure scenes from his own social class of people strolling in the park, sitting in cafes, horseback riding or playing tennis. When the work of the young landscape painter Walter Leistikow was rejected by the jury of the annual Berlin salon in 1898, it spurred Leistikow and Liebermann to organize an alternative artists’ movement, the Berlin Secession. Serving as the Berlin Secession founding president for thirteen years, Liebermann championed the inclusion in Secession exhibitions of such contemporary foreign artists as Edvard Munch, whose brooding Symbolism scandalized the public. As Liebermann felt increasing pressure from within the Secession – with the emergence of German Expressionism and debates about modernism – and from the complex nationalist atmosphere in German society around World War I, he retreated more frequently to his country home on the shore of Lake Wannsee, southwest of Berlin. During the war, its gardens began to assume a prominent role in Liebermann’s paintings. The cultivation and beauty that suffused these works belie the increasing threat that beset German Jewry throughout this period. In his final years, as he awakened from the “dream of assimilation” to the nightmare of Nazism, the painter who always strove to depict people and objects as truthfully and objectively as possible no longer “wanted to see this new world around [him].” His final self-portrait shows his resignation at having been betrayed by the nation with which he so fervently identified. Liebermann, one of Berlin’s most celebrated cultural figures, who was made an honorary citizen of the city in 1927 and had been president of the Prussian Academy since 1920, was forced to resign from the academy in 1933 as Nazi attacks on him intensified. Liebermann died in Berlin in 1935, at the age of eighty-seven, two years after Hitler assumed the office of Chancellor. In 1943, the artist’s wife, Martha, took poison on the eve of deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. When Max Liebermann died he had been fully ostracized from public life. His paintings vanished from public collections throughout Germany. Visit The Jewish Museum .Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
Related Articles :
