After Max Liebermann (1847-1935) German, Pastel on Paper. An interpretation of the artist's piece Holländische Dorfstrasse (Dutch Village Street), first painted in 1885. Shows two women talking next to a cow and a wheel barrow. Signed and inscribed indistinctly bottom right.
Condition: Possible water damage.
Overall Size: 37 1/4 x 25 1/2 in.
Sight Size: 28 x 18 1/2 in.
#53 #5984 .
Max Liebermann was born July 20th, 1847 in Berlin, then the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia. The son of a Jewish banker, Liebermann never enjoyed traditional schooling but quickly discovered a love of drawing, and in 1859 he accompanied his mother to visit the painter Antonie Volkmar, who saw his potential and arranged for private lessons with Eduard Holbien and Carl Steffeck. After graduating from high school, Liebermann enrolled at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, majoring in chemistry but more and more devoted to his art. He met Wilhelm Bode, who later became director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and Liebermann’s first sponsor. He then studied law and philosophy at the University of Berlin but quit in 1868, traveling to Weimar to explore painting at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School. He volunteered to serve in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, serving as a medic in the siege of Metz, and afterwards stayed in Düsseldorf, where he was influenced by French art and realism. He traveled to the Netherlands, heavily inspired by the light, people, and landscape of Amsterdam and Scheveningen. His rejection of Romanticism and focus on working class subjects was not well received when he exhibited for the first time in 1872, so he moved to a studio in Montmartre, but the Parisian artists showed him nothing but disdain. In 1878 Liebermann took a trip to Italy and met a group of Munich painters in Venice, eventually moving in with them in the Bavarian capital where he finally achieved success but also heightened notoriety due to rampant anti-semitism. He became the first German artist to receive an honorable mention at the Paris Salon in 1880, but found himself dividing his time more and more between the more tolerant Netherlands and his hometown of Berlin, where he eventually returned in 1884 and remained for the rest of his life. His primary motifs from then on were scene studies of the bourgeoisie, as well as aspects of his garden near Lake Wannsee, although he became especially noted for his portraits, fulfilling more than 200 commissions over the years including of Albert Einstein and Paul von Hindenburg. In 1885 he married Martha Marckwald, with whom he had one daughter, and was accepted into the Association of Berlin Artists. Lauded for his Impressionist ideal and exploration of modernist techniques, Liebermann was honored on his 50th birthday with a solo exhibition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, eventually becoming their president in 1920. From 1899 to 1911 he led the premier avant-garde formation in Germany, the Berlin Secession. In 1927 Liebermann was celebrated as one of Germany’s greatest artists, but in 1933 he resigned from the Academy due to new anti-Jewish laws. Liebermann died on February 8th, 1935 in his house on Pariser Platz. His enormous art collection of his own and other Impressionists works, which his wife inherited afterwards, was looted by the Nazis when she committed suicide to avoid being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, and many have never been recovered. In 2006 the Max Liebermann Society opened a permanent museum in the family villa in Berlin to help preserve his legacy and work, with activists and researchers still seeking out his lost pieces and helping to demonstrate his importance to the development of the 20th Century art world.
Condition
Possible water damage.
