the forgotten art of max libermann

The Forgotten Art of Max LibermannAuthor(s): Alfred WernerSource: Art Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1964), pp. 214-221Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/774474 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 13:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.125 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 13:36:34 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/774474?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Alfred Werner

THE FORGOTTEN ART OF MAX LIEBERMANN

Were it not for Germany's Realists and Secessionists, there would be nothing to fill the gap between the genera- tions of Arnold Boecklin and Emil Nolde, between Romanti- cism and Expressionism. Oddly, German art has no equivalent to the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. It is in- correct to speak of Max Liebermann and his fellow-Secession- ists as "German Impressionists," though this is done frequently by historians. The Spectrum Palette was not used by Max Liebermann and his associates who have in common with the French Luminists only plain air painting which practice after all was pioneered by the Barbizon School. Misunderstanding has often led writers to deal unfairly with the German school of the end of the 19th century, and, in particular, with its chef d'ecole. Werner Haftmann is, perhaps, Liebermann's harshest critic. In Painting in the Twentieth Century, he admits that Liebermann, as well as his friends Slevogt and Corinth, were "excellent painters," but he also charges that they were "insensitive to the dynamic forces of the epoch and lacked the esprit critique which helps new ideas to take shape quickly and surely." He implies that Liebermann (born in 1847!) should have abandoned his manner of painting and joined, first the Bruecke, then the Blaue Reiter, thereafter the Neue Sachlichkeit, and so forth (for Liebermann lived to the year 1935, continuing to paint until the very end). Thus he could have avoided being labeled a "reactionary" (this is the term actually used by Haftmann). But this is nonsense. One must not demand of an artist that he always be "up-to-date", all we must ask him to be is-true to his own vision, to his ideals (which Liebermann certainly was).

He was no more a reactionary than was his predecessor, the much older Adolf von Menzel who painted the Iron Mill in 1876, at a time when official Germany was loath to accept a work full of heat and steam, with brawny figures of laborers. In Wilhelm Leibl's Women in a Church (1883) one can find the power and strength of the Neue Sachlichkeit of four decades later. Completely unknown outside Germany are such masters as Franz Skarbina whose View from the Eiffel Tower superbly renders the mysterious effects of myriads of electri- cal lights; or Leopold von Kalkreuth whose Homewards- a farm hand on horseback talking to a girl-in its merciless realism has none of the "genre" quality that pleased the bourgeois in the Kaiser's Germany; or Walter Leistikow who was the first to paint the Grunewald lakes near Berlin; or the dynamic Lesser Ury, painter of metropolitan Berlin.

None of these was an Impressionist in the sense of Monet and his school. They were, all of them, Northern artists, fascinated chiefly by the somber beauty of austere vistas, devoid of the douceur of France. They painted the way Van Gogh would have continued to paint, had he never left Holland for France. Some of the artists did, indeed, go to the

Netherlands where Jozef Israels and his school confined themselves to an austere palette in which purples, blues, greys and

greens prevail. In Liebermann one finds much of Israels, the creator of shapes spontaneously brushed with little concern for

photographic truth, that Israels who painted figures in the faint light cast into a dark room by a setting sun, or in the

heavy mists of the shore, everything resolving itself into tones. In the early Van Gogh one finds influences of both Israels and Liebermann. Vincent's letters from the Drenthe period (the autumn of 1883) repeatedly refer to Liebermann whose works, as far, Van Gogh knew only from careful descriptions that had been given him by Theo. ". . . Now that I have seen the landscape here, I can understand perfectly how logically he is led to it." Soon thereafter Vincent did see some of Liebermann's works; an oil by the German master, The Weaver

(1882) seems to have influenced drawings and a painting by Van Gogh on the same motif. He tried unsuccessfully to meet Liebermann.

Today, Van Gogh ranks very high above Liebermann. Yet about the turn of the century, when Van Gogh was still unknown outside a small circle of cognoscenti, Liebermann was known everywhere as "the most important of living Ger- man artists," and in the 1920's the Weimar Republic held in the same high esteem in which France held the octogenarian Monet. The phrase in quotes comes from James Gibbons Huneker, and is evidence that Liebermann's name was not unknown outside Germany. In 1916 Liebermann's Ropewalk -one of his few oils to enter American public collections- was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in 1942, it was taken off the wall and placed in storage, from which the painting has not so far re-emerged.

To put it bluntly, fate has not been as kind to the dead artist as it had been during his lifetime when it showered

many, perhaps too many accolades on Liebermann. In any event, the time has arrived for a re-appraisal of his personality, and the role he played in a long period of modern art. Indeed, this master's life spans the age of German liberalism, from the Revolution of 1848 which ushered in bourgeois de-

mocracy, to the Nazi upheaval of 1933 that put an end to it. In the field of art, this span extended from Camille Corot to the age of Arp, Masson, and Mir6. His productivity and ver-

satility were prodigious. Over nearly seventy years he finished

enough oils, etchings, lithographs and drawings to fill several museums. He was an enthusiastic pamphleteer and highly articulate. His writings, correspondence, and remembered wit, if all published, would fill a shelf. Liebermann's sharp tongue brought to life epigrams that are sparkling today, twenty years after his death, among German-speaking people the world over. Liebermann was, in addition, an energetic or-

ganizer who played a prominent role in the anti-academic movements of the nineties and the early years of this century, especially in the Berlin Sezession and the Deutscher Kuenstler- bund.

On the other hand, there exists little gossip about him of the sort that spices the biographies of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, and Pascin, all of whom he watched both arrive and perish. Lacking their unbridled fervor, he was spared their agonies-and, at the same time, denied some of the ultimate glories of their achievement. Liebermann was a bourgeois sans vices who, in his thirties, rich himself, married the daughter of a rich Berlin jeweler. He loved the

ART JOURNAL XXIII 3 214



Fig. 2. The Flax Spinners, 1887, Staatliches Museum, East Berlin.

i.1. Eva, 1883, Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Fig. 1. Eva, 1883, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

companionship of his family, loved his stately Berlin town house and his summer home on the shore of the Wannsee, and loved his precious collection of Impressionists. He was a clever businessman, able to convince his patrons-who included Germany's high nobility and captains of industry- that they had to pay a stiff price for the privilege of owning a Liebermann. When in his sixties he cheerfully confessed that there was little unusual or abnormal about him:

"In my habits I am the most perfect bourgeois. I eat, drink, sleep, take a stroll or work with the regularity of a tower clock. I live in the house where I spent my childhood, and it would be hard for me to live elsewhere. Moreover, I

prefer Berlin to any other city as a residence." In his moderation and restraint that, to outsiders, ap-

peared like coldness, he reminds us of his younger contemporary, Thomas Mann, like him a humanist and scion of a wealthy family, like him successful in a worldly way, showered with titles and decorations, always present at banquets and congresses, yet always reserved and detached. The physiognomy of neither contains that element which is ordinarily recognized as "artistic." Mann and Liebermann alike look more like cultivated bankers, diplomats, or real-estate men, than artists.

But this appearance was just as deceptive in Liebermann's

Fig. 3. The Net Menders, 1894. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

case as it is in Mann's. Liebermann was a sensitive person and an outstanding artist who fully deserved having his pictures hung in all German museums, and in museums of Vienna, Prague, Paris, Florence, and London as well.

In America Liebermann has yet to be discovered, like those other German artists Menzel and Leibl before him, and Corinth and Slevogt, who were a few years younger. Americans unable to travel abroad have only the rather medi- ocre black-and-white reproductions in Max J. Friedlaender's Liebermann biography of 1924, or the somewhat better ones in the fourth revised edition of Karl Scheffler's book on him that was published by the Insel-Verlag in 1953 (the first edition appeared in 1906).* A well-illustrated catalogue raisonne of the artist's graphic work, by Gustav Schiefler, was

published in 1923, twelve years before Liebermann's death. The authoritative sources within reach of the English-speaking reader tell him only that Liebermann had done for his country what Millet had done for France (Encyclopaedia Britannica), or that he was for Germany what Renoir was for France (Sir William Rothenstein of the Tate Gallery).

* Quite recently, Hanover's Feuerreiter-Verlag issued a new book, with reproductions in black-and-white and in color, with a text by Ferdinand Stuttmann.

215 Werner: The Forgotten Art of Max Liebermann



Fig. 4. Terrace in Restaurant, 1902. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Fig. 6. The Ropewalk, 1904. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 5. View of Dutch Town from the Dunes, drawing, Stadtliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.

Unlike Millet, the son of a peasant, and a farm hand in his youth, and unlike Renoir, the son of a poor tailor, and an apprentice to a porcelain manufacturer in his boyhood, Liebermann came of a rich patrician family, and received traditional academic education. In his teens he shocked his father, a very respectable and conservative industrialist, with his decision to become an artist. (One of his two brothers, Felix, also drifted away from the business world, leaving his job in a banking firm to study history, and receiving for his Law of the Anglo-Saxons degrees from both Oxford and

Cambridge.) When the elder Liebermann saw that Max could not be swayed in his decision, he was sent to the best teacher available-that is, the one old Louis Liebermann thought the most successful in the social and financial realm, and that was Carl Steffeck, a now completely forgotten painter of soldiers and horses.

The Liebermann story began with the artist's paternal grandfather (who was also grandfather of Walther Rathenau), who had in 1824 moved from a provincial town, Maerkisch- Friedland, to Berlin and established there a cotton-print fac- tory fully equipped with machinery of the British type. This Joseph Liebermann was once presented at court to Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia. When the king asked which Lieber-

mann he was, he replied, proudly: "Your Majesty, I am the one who swept the English from the Continent-as far as printed cotton is concerned."

Both the grand old man and his grandson owed their success very much to the fact that they kept on looking beyond the borders of Prussia. Max Liebermann might, perhaps, never have freed himself of the fetters of mid-century German art -ranging from saccharine genre scenes and sterile romanti- cism to histrionic historical painting-had not early journeys to the Netherlands and France mellowed the influences of his Prussian upbringing.

However, he completed his first ambitious work, a huge canvas, Women Plucking Geese as early as 1872, just before his trip to Paris and discovery of the unorthodox, socially conscious realism of a Courbet and Millet. Years later he recalled that, as a student at the Weimar Academy, strong- hold of lifeless classicism, he had, one morning, on a stroll, observed laborers toiling in the fields. A sudden flash of inspiration told him that there was beauty in their rhythmic movements, and that these were the people he must paint. WIomen Plucking Geese treated a subject that hardly any "self- respecting" German artist would then have cared to approach: a dozen peasant women in a gloomy room plucking birds in their laps, while a man is carrying in more geese. Exhibited in Hamburg and Berlin, this huge and somber canvas caused an




Fig. 7. Beach Scene in Nordwyk, 1908. Landesgalerie, Hanover.

uproar, earning the young artist the sobriquet, "apostle of

ugliness." The only one to congratulate him was a middle-

aged, dwarfish colleague, the famous and honored Adolf Menzel, who himself had dared to defy conventions by depict- ing workers in factories. Menzel felt, however, that here was a precocious and, therefore, dangerous talent: "I would call this a master work if you were fifty, but at twenty-five you are not yet able to paint."

There was more brashness, more definition in the lad of

twenty-five than in the old Liebermann who, at last, discovered that, as he put it, "Kunst ist die Kunst wegzulassen," art is the art of omission. Today Women Plucking Geese strikes us as the tour de force of a talented man, clever in composition, but, on the whole, more constructed than seen. In France, where Millet and Courbet had already prepared the way for art that dealt with the "plain" people, Women Plucking Geese was greeted with enthusiasm; when Liebermann visited Paris several recognized painters urged him to stay with them and even become a French citizen. This last, Liebermann, the Ger- man patriot, would never do.

We often see an artist start out as a rebel, intolerant, self-assertive, anxious to force the whole world to see his

point. As the years go by, however, he will become colder and less spontaneous; he will repeat his fine early achievements, with greater skill perhaps, but with less conviction. As an old man, he will live on the glory of his early triumphs.

There are, however, exceptions to this rule, and Lieber- mann was one of them. Basically he was no revolutionary, either in youth or age. After the success of Women Plucking Geese, he continued for another two decades to paint huge dark pictures of workers in fields, shops, and factories, rather new in subject matter, as far as German art was concerned, but strictly traditional in technique. During these same twenty years Monet, Pissarro, Sisley were exploring the possibilities of Impressionism: Seurat was inventing pointillisme, Degas and Renoir were hacking out their own revolutionary paths; Van Gogh killed himself, Gauguin retreated to Tahiti, and Cezanne to Aix. Liebermann, though aware of all this, was

seemingly unaffected. He went to Holland to copy Frans Hals'

portraits, and there associated himself with an eminent repre-

sentative of pre-Impressionist painting and a fellow Jew, the above-mentioned Jozef Israels.

Impressionism of a sort came to him rather late, when he was at the height of his European fame. Before his forties, he had never painted outdoors spontaneously sur le motif, only in the studio after careful preliminary sketches from nature. His frequent sojourns in Dutch fishing villages, however, did leave a cumulative effect upon him. Had he remained in Berlin, he would, perhaps, never have discovered the thrill of atmospheric changes, of sunlight intermingling with mist, of blue haze, of quiet empty spaces. Gradually, the large groups of people in his canvases give way to smaller ones, then to one person in a landscape, and finally even that one disappears, to leave nothing but the mystery of nature unadulterated by the tricks of man. Or where groups of people do remain, they are no longer drawn in static detail-but form color spots glittering and vibrating to convey fleeting movement.

It is a curious thing that Liebermann is known, and even appreciated by historians of art, mainly for his earlier work, which earned him the art historian, Richard Muther's praise as "the Prometheus who brought the divine fire from Barbizon" and as the one through whom the spirit of Millet had crossed the border into Germany. But to many, including the present writer, the work of his later years is far more significant and valuable. The error is often made of suggesting that, in his middle and last years, Liebermann was merely a carbon copy of the French Impressionists; actually, Liebermann was never an Impressionist strictly speaking. His palette did grow lighter and brighter over the years, but unlike Monet, he was not primarily concerned with the way in which iridescent light and atmosphere dissolved forms.

Liebermann's interest, when he was past fifty, centered on the excitement of movement, speed, rhythm. The Futurists, too, were fascinated by speed-that of modern vehicles and machinery. Liebermann, however, chose polo riders in action, youths bathing in the surf, horses shying at the waves. He also liked the bustling crowds in Amsterdam's Jewish Jodenbrees- Straat: between 1905 and 1909 he time and again sketched and painted scenes in this three-hundred-year-old ghetto, thrilled by its pictorial wealth-the huddled, dirty walls, the crowds rushing around carts heaped with vegetables, the colors in pell-mell motion.

Some connoisseurs consider his Jodenbrees-Straat pictures to be the climax of Liebermann's art. Others prefer the landscapes and seascapes he painted in the decade before 1914: the Elbe River on a rainy day, the dunes near Katwyk and Noord- wyk, all pictures with a certain grandeur. Earlier, too, he had painted landscapes, but merely as backdrop for figures: then, in Women with Goats (1890) an old peasant woman is shown leading two goats over a sandy, wind-swept slope. The mood of the gray, deserted region is well caught, but the technique is still restrained, the "Kunst wegzulassen" not yet quite mastered.

If asked which aspects of Liebermann's vast ouevre I myself prefer above all, I should say, without much hesitation; the pictures he did of his home and garden at Wannsee in his last decades, his numerous self-portraits, and his graphic work in black and white. After the First World War, Lieber- mann had to stop his yearly trips to Holland. Well over seventy, he was too frail for the journey and, for inspiration,




Fig. 8. Self Portrait, 1909, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

had to turn to the resources offered by his summer home, on Wannsee, a lake near Berlin. But by now he had achieved an unsurpassed mastery and freedom of expression. These garden pictures, from which flowers flash like so many jewels, are glories of color: silver blues blend with olive-green and flaming orange, to create a vivid impression of universal light caught in the prism of a small space. Again and again he painted his garden, saturating himself with the deep color of the flowers, the cool, moist air, the perspective of the lawn. Whereas in his earlier pictures bright colors are usually set off against dark tones, here they are allowed to blend har- moniously with the rich green foliage, the light tones of the gravel paths, and the terraces. There is motion, light, atmosphere-and yet the form is preserved, the pictures are closer to Pissarro than to Monet.

Liebermann was a celebrated portraitist who demanded steep fees from his sitters, and got them. Though brilliantly done, many of these portraits leave one somewhat cold.

He once said that Hals gave him the desire to paint, whereas Rembrandt overwhelmed him to the point of making him drop his brushes. His portraits are, indeed, more "Hals" than "Rembrandt"-except for his self-portraits. He knew himself, he was not afraid of himself, he painted himself unflatteringly (he was as "ugly" as Rembrandt or Van Gogh) every other year. One of his last self-portraits hangs in the Tate Gallery: the octogenarian's skin is yellowish, his lips are sadly turned downward, the eyes are still penetrating, bespeaking a great wisdom, acquired in a long busy life.

But perhaps the best Liebermann is to be found in his

Fig. 9. Portrait of Wilhelm von Bode, etching. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

graphic work. The catalogue raisonne registers hundreds of

etchings and lithographs. There are also many woodcuts. Pos- sibly the best things, however, are his drawings-rapid pen sketches, nervously scribbled ink drawings seizing a quick movement, a telling gesture, the magnitude of a wide-open landscape.

True, he had his limitations. The bourgeois in him did not permit the development of a free-acting imagination as we find working in Chagall, or the penetrating fervor of a Soutine. What Meier-Graefe had said about the Weimar student, that he had "not a spark of comprehension for things he could not see and count on his fingers" was true of Lieber- mann to the end of his days. For him to distort nature was a sin! Counter-attacking those who had accused him of poverty of imagination, he declared, in his Credo of 1922:

"It is one of the gravest, and therefore most inexcusable, aesthetic misconceptions to imagine that the more faithfully a painter depicts reality, the less he is a visionary. . . . The more or less faithful depiction of nature is not the criterion by which to judge perception; the decisive factor is the great- ness and strength of the artistic personality."

In other respects, too, Liebermann was a conservative. There was sympathy, but not a trace of "social protest," in his pictures of workers. Though he could be very outspoken as a pamphleteer, letter-writer or public speaker in matters concerning art, he was politically a middle-of-the-roader, who,




unlike George Grosz, Kaethe Kollwitz, Dix, or Beckmann, never used his pen or brush to rebuke man for his inhumanity. Certainly, Emperor William II had chosen the wrong man when he labeled him an "anarchist." He defended the Im- pressionists against unjust attacks (see Pissarro's letter to Lucien, of September 8, 1903), and he collected their works, but stopped right there. For the intentions of Expressionists like Nolde, or abstract artists like Kandinsky he had only scorn and derision.

The very fact is that in his old age he became to the generation born around 1885 the visible personification of all that was old-fashioned and even reactionary caused, in the 'twenties, the pendulum to swing away from all that he stood for. But the connoisseurs in Weimar Germany knew that there was a great deal of painterly quality in the work of the sage of Wannsee, and that good painting was good painting re- gardless of epoch or style. Even the Nazis knew it, though they had ousted the old gentleman from his honorary presi- dency of the Akademie, and subjected him to all sorts of un- pleasantness. All pictures of his were removed from the walls -to be safely packed up in the museum vaults. In the begin- ning of the Nazi regime, here and there a voice was raised to exempt Liebermann, who had assimilated himself with such success to the "deutsches Wesen," from the general condem- nation of "Jewish" art. The new director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, though himself a Storm Trooper, dared to in- clude two Liebermann paintings in an exhibition held in the fall of 1934-and was promptly fired from his job.

Indeed, it was very difficult to find "Jewish traits" in Liebermann's art, though some Nazi diehards, of course, man- aged to do so. In an era less biased than that of the Third Reich, Wilhelm von Bode, the famous director of the National- galerie in Berlin, and the celebrated poet, Richard Dehmel, had hailed Liebermann as one of the "most German" among living artists. The painter's very loyal and devoted biographer, the aforementioned Karl Scheffler, finds himself at a loss to state what Jewish characteristics could be found in his old friend; all he would concede was a certain internationalism, a lack of chauvinistic narrowness that allowed Liebermann to go to Paris only a year or so after the Franco-Prussian war, and, in subsequent years, to view non-Germanic art with free, unbiased eyes, to the benefit of the skill parochial, still provincial, still repressed German art.

In his work, no sober searcher for "Jewish traits" would be able to find them there, no more than in the work of Pissarro, or the Russian Levitan. Herbert Read (in A Coat of Many Colors, 1945) admits that of what he considers Jewish qualities, "rhetoric" and "psychological fantasy," nothing can be found in Liebermann. At the same time, Read failed to find in him any of the transcendental, metaphysical feeling so frequent among German artists. Perhaps it is the safest thing to say that the artist's character can, to a degree, be traced to his background of an enlightened Jewish bourgeois of Berlin, the most matter-of-fact, sober, unromantic place in Europe.

There is little Jewish subject matter in his work, apart from the ghetto of Amsterdam, the lithographs he did for Heine's Rabbi of Bacharach, and a head of a rabbi. Twice did he tackle Biblical subjects-in the Christ in the Temple, made in 1878, which was subsequently the target of violent anti- Semitic assaults, and in two versions of Samson and Delilah, both done in the first decade of the century. It is hard for us

today to understand why the first picture should have caused a riot; it shows Jesus as a handsome blond child talking very informally to a group of bearded, thoughtful elders. Ironically, critics attacked the young master for having portrayed an "ugly, smart-alecky Jew boy surrounded by a pack of dirty Jewish usurers"-as a matter of fact, all the models used were Gentiles. It is a genre picture, technically faultless, yet emotionally unconvincing; another such painting, Samson and Delilah, is likewise a brilliant failure in its melodramatic approach.

Though little concerned with Jewish affairs, Liebermann was proud of his origin, and ready to challenge antagonists. Once he told the German ambassador at London, Prince Lichnowsky, who sat for him, that his, the sitter's, skull re- minded him of those of Jewish prisoners on an old Assyrian relief. When the nobleman furiously exclaimed: "If you please, I happen to belong to the oldest Polish-German aristocracy!" Liebermann shouted back: "If you please, I belong to a still older nobility!"

In his letters, some of which were published in a small volume by Schocken (Siebzig Briefe, edited by Franz Lands- berger, Berlin 1937), the artist showed that he was very much aware of his Jewishness. He writes to one critic in 1899:

"It is true that I have been compared to Spinoza already once before; but my vanity does not go so far that I could accept this highest praise. Perhaps Spinoza, who drew himself, was influenced ... by Rembrandt ... in any event, they have in common an endless sympathy for their fellow-men, and perhaps there is also something of it in me, thanks to my origin which with-alas-too much that is painful, has the advantage that it makes one less unfeeling towards another person's sufferings."

He was no Jewish nationalist. Replying to birthday con- gratulations sent him by Meir Dizengoff, founder and burgo- master of Tel Aviv, in 1931, the old master gave his credo:

"There exists only art as such; it knows neither religious nor political frontiers. It is a different thing as far as the artists themselves are concerned who may be bound together by their fatherland or by their religion. Though I have, throughout my life, considered myself a German, I was very much aware of my belonging to the Jewish people .... Though not a Zionist -for I belong to an earlier generation-I watch the ideal goals at which it aims with the greatest interest."

Two years later, all of his illusions about the peaceful symbiosis of German and Jew were shattered. Terrible though the year 1933 was for the griefstricken old man, he was, at least, able to derive some satisfaction from the fact that in the newly founded Tel Aviv Museum a gallery was named for him. Thanking Dizengoff and the Hebrew poet, Bialik, for the honor, he said that, were it not for his age, he, too, would emigrate to Palestine: "Leider kann man einen so alten Baum nicht mehr verpflanzen" (Alas, you can't transplant so old a tree).

In two letters of 1934, one to Franz Landsberger, the other to the collector Carl Sachs, he admits that the new political set-up had changed everything beyond hope:

"From the beautiful dream of assimilation we have been alas, awakened very violently. For the Jewish young people I see no solution except the emigration to Palestine, where they will be able to live as free men and escape the dangers of life as immigrants..."

In the same year, a former pupil of his, the Swiss painter




Fig. 10. Portrait of a Girl with Dachshund, drawing. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

Gustava Iselin-Haeger, a non-Jew, visited him at Wannsee. "You know," he said to her, "if I had died a year ago I would have been a happy man." Thereupon the lady remarked, with hesitation: "To be happy is, however, not the greatest thing in life. Sorrows are, perhaps, helpful in the development of a man." He replied, with a radiant smile: "Indeed, you know, I really believe that my work has improved."

The Liebermann saga did not end with his death in Febru- ary 1935. He was quietly taken to his last refuge in an old Jewish cemetery at the Schoenhauser Tor; only three "Aryan" colleagues followed the coffin-Kaethe Kollwitz, Hans Purr- mann, and Konrad von Kardorff. The only memorial exhibition was a small one in the Jewish Museum. Mrs. Liebermann survived her husband by eight years. But when, in 1943, she was informed that the Gestapo was about to deport her to the East, she committed suicide. The Liebermann house was subsequently looted, and his collection of Menzels and Im- pressionists stolen and dispersed; the house itself was de- stroyed in an air raid.

After the war, the Germans remembered "their" Lieber- mann. His pictures were put back on the walls. In 1947 the 100th anniversary of his birth was commemorated in the leading papers and magazines of the Bonn Republic, and in 1954 a large memorial show, featuring more than one hundred

and twenty items, was opened at Hannover by President Heuss. And what about the future? Will his good work be in-

cluded in every chapter on late 19th and early 20th century art? Will future art historians recognize that, without him and his colleagues of the Sezession, no room might have been found for the subsequent more radical rebellions of Die Bruecke and Der Blaue Reiter? Or will he be obscure outside the Reich?

To be absolutely fair to him, let us never forget that he grew up in a Germany that had no equivalent to a Delacroix, a Millet or a Courbet. To understand the state of art in nine- teenth-century Germany, one must imagine a France that could boast only Gerome, Messionier and Bouguereau! At the outset of his career Liebermann was considered a revolutionary (an "anarchist," in the Kaiser's words), for in the Germany of 1872 Women Plucking Geese was a bold act for a bourgeois; never before had a self-respecting German artist approached such a plebeian motif. This large picture of a dozen peasant women working in a gloomy room was unusual only in subject matter, however, for it was served in the brownish sauce of the Academy (whereas in France, in the same year, color already glowed and sparkled in the Pont Neuf pictures of Monet and Renoir).

In the realm of the Hohenzollerns, a painter was expected to devote his attention to the festivities in Potsdam, or to the maneuvers of the victory-swollen German army, rather than to "prosaic" farmers and fishermen, cobblers and weavers, orphan asylums and homes for the aged, unidealized and unromanti. cized as they were in Liebermann's canvases. But he went even a step further in his audacity. With the proceeds of the sale of Women Plucking Geese, the twenty-five-year-old artist made his first trip to Paris, capital of Prussia's recent "arch- enemy," and in the next year, 1873, he went back for a pro- longed stay. He was, seemingly, unaware of what the Impres- sionists were doing. But he saw and admired works by Millet. Old Corot came to the young man's studio and, not finding him in, wrote "bravo, bravissimo" on a sketch the foreigner had made of the Folies Bergere. The academician Bonnat urged the young man to acquire French citizenship and to settle in Paris. Other Frenchmen were less hospitable. A Parisian in- dicted the Salon for allowing the German to exhibit: "I will always assert," the journalist declared, "that it is a crime to perform Richard Wagner in France and to admit Prussians to our exhibitions.

It was wise of him to return to Germany-he would not have made a good, convincing Frenchman. Basically, he was a jovial, unceasingly active, pragmatic Berliner who could be pugnacious and throw darts in all directions. Beneath this shell was a most sensitive, introspective "Nordic" soul. It comes through clearly in the subtle essays the artist wrote about painters and painting, in his lengthy private letters, and, of course, in his work. It is, in many ways, the very antithesis of the joie de vivre spirit in French Impressionism (though now and then the general somberness is interrupted by scenes of crowds in beer gardens, of mothers and chil- dren in summer dresses promenading on sidewalks under trees). The French have no equivalents to The Net Menders or to Woman with Goats, both cool-pigmented, both full of sadness and loneliness, yet also overpowering with the spiritual grandeur of the monumental figures, set against a depressingly empty nature. Woman with Goats (Munich) has nothing of the sentimentality that mars some of the painter's early pic-




Fig. 11. At the Uhlenhorster Fihrhaus, 1910, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

tures: everything bespeaks the mercilessness of a bleak and desolate land, with the towering old peasant, her two obstinate goats and the barren earth forming a complete unity.

Yet, having developed what for Germany at least was a

unique, original subject matter, Liebermann, from these noble but somewhat static pictures, progressed to a loosening-up in both form and color. After 1900, movement, speed, rhythm enter, a rejuvenation takes place-Liebermann reversed the traditional pattern by growing freer, more spontaneous, the older he became. As a sexagenarian, he chose for subject matter polo and tennis players in rapid action, sinewy youths swimming in the sea as the waves are rolling in, horses rear- ing in the foam-crested surf. Here he bypassed Impressionism and came close to Expressionism and Futurism.

Apart from Jodenbreestraat-the equivalent of New York's Lower East Side-he liked to paint, in plein-air, the somber flatness of the landscapes where Van Gogh's genius had arisen. Frequent sojourns in Dutch fishing villages had, indeed, a cumulative effect upon him-who, before his forties, had never painted outdoors, but only in the studio, after careful preliminary sketches from nature. Had he remained in Berlin he might not have discovered the thrill of atmospheric changes, of sunlight intermingling with mist, of blue hazes, of quiet empty places. He might not even have developed an eye for the austere beauty of the lakes and forests around the capital that were the favorite subject matter of Walter Leistikow, or for the rain-spattered, glistening metropolitan streets that Lesser Ury loved to paint (to mention two other German "Impressionists"). In Holland, he learned to re- produce, or rather represent, the landscape with fewer and fewer people, the figures becoming so small that they almost disappear in the general aspect, until finally they are omitted altogether, and nothing remains but the mystery of nature unadulterated by the tricks of man. Holland, more than any- thing else, helped rid him of heavy-handed brushwork, of "gallery varnish" and other obstacles to the free manipula- tion of his talent. To find himself, he needed the solemn quiet of the dunes at Katwyck and Noordwyck, the spectacle of the North Sea, the drama of light and space.

He did not reach the public with his fine, small land-

scapes, though, no more than Gainesborough impressed eight- eenth-century London with the "landskips" he preferred to paint. The British artist has told us that he was "sick of Portraits," but we have no reason to believe that Liebermann, who was renowned and highly paid for his likenesses of famous people, ever loathed this more "commercial" part of his activities. For-as I gathered from conversations with people who had known him personally-he was a curious blend of an introspective poet (who would spend many hours on lonely walks through the austere countryside) and a worldly, businesslike extrovert, capable of being as "unromantic" as his father and grandfather, both textile manufacturers. His portraits are never as profound or stirring as those of a Kokoschka, which are veritable X-ray photographs exploring hidden strata in a man's existence. They do not measure up to the violently brushed, often brutal revelations produced by Liebermann's younger contemporary, Lovis Corinth.

Liebermann too glibly accepted the realist Wilhelm Leibl's

pat formula: "Paint man as he is and his soul will of itself show in the portrait." It fails to show up in most of the dazzling portraits of statesmen, burgomasters, scientists, gen- erals and celebrated authors that Liebermann painted with a dash, a broad virtuosity of brushwork reminiscent of Hals, or, among moderns, Sargent. An exception is the masterly portrait of the surgeon Sauerbruch (in the Hamburg Kunsthalle), which not only depicts the sitter's features with ferocious exactness but also seems to reveal his ironic wisdom and ready strength. While his portraits are, at least, astonishing tours de force, nothing positive can be said about his attempts to embark upon flights of imagination. A master in reproducing arbitrary fragments of visible life, Liebermann, like Courbet before him, was decidedly too much of a skeptic for religious subjects. Courbet, whose famous motto was "Show me an angel and I'll paint you one," wisely avoided them. Lieber- mann did not, and ambitious canvases such as The Young Jesus among the Rabbis, Samson and Delilah, Job and His Friends or St. Paulus and the Viper, are unconvincing, melodramatic catastrophies devoid of inner life.

Creative imagination was not his forte. Yet he was more than just an eye. For he was extremely intelligent. His respon- siveness to nature was always coupled with a never-ceasing reverence for the demands of composition. "One has to learn to see," he wrote in his study of Degas, "in just the same way as one has to learn to hear a movement of Beethoven." Like Van Gogh-though he was otherwise very unlike the un- happy, frustrated Dutchman-he learned to see by contem- plating his "ugly" face. Of his numerous self-portraits (without the flattery of the commissioned portraits), I like best the one mentioned before, in the Tate Gallery. The eyes are still penetrating, bespeaking the wisdom acquired in a long, busy life, though the skin has the yellowishness of old age and the lips turn sadly down.

He also learned to see by making thousands of rapid pen, pencil, crayon and chalk sketches, nervously scribbled drawings that seize a quick movement, a telling gesture, the magnitude of a wide-open landscape. With their sensitive im- petuosity, their elimination of all but the absolutely essential elements, they are reminiscent of Rembrandt, as are some of the masterpieces Liebermann etched on copper plate.

Mr. Werner, a frequent contributor to Art Journal, is editor of Art Voices.




the forgotten art of max libermann

Documents