by Christa Nwokedi

Created on: February 09, 2010   Last Updated: February 10, 2010

Max Liebermann  - 75th Anniversary of his death

In 1933, National socialists marched with burning flambeaus through Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to take over power in Germany. Painter Max Liebermann expressed his disgust in his usual witty way by saying: “I can't eat as much as I would like to puke.”

Liebermann was the leading exponent of the German Impressionism and forerunner of Modernism. National socialist stigmatized him as “Apostle of ugliness”; classified his paintings “as decadent art,” blamed him of using a “dirty easels” and painting of unheroic motives.

The German painter, Max Liebermann was born in Berlin on July 18th, 1847. He died on in Berlin on February 8th, 1935. He was the son of the wealthy Jewish entrepreneur Louis Liebermann and his wife Martha. At the early age of nine, he already drew his surroundings with exceptional talent. He received his first drawing lessons from Berlin's painter Carl Steffeck. Parallel to his studies of Law and Philosophy at Berlin University, he attended the Academy of Art in Weimar (Saxony) between 1866 and 1872.

Influenced by the realism of paintings of the Hungarian painter Mihály Munkácsy (1844-1900), he produced his famous painting the “Geese pluckers” in 1871. He openly showed the unpicturesque reality and received strong rejection, but it became Liebermann’s characteristic way of painting. Liebermann believed that: “A well painted turnip is better than a badly painted Madonna.”

From 1873 to 1878, Liebermann lived in Paris and the artist village Barbizon in France. He studied the art of painter Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) who painted the simple village style. Liebermann traveled regularly to the Netherlands where he found the unpathetic simplicity for his motives, farmers, seamstresses, orphans, and landscapes. In 1879, the First International Art Exhibition in Munich showed his only painting with a religious motive “The Twelve-Year Old Jesus in the Temple.” Public and critics perceived the realistic style of the painting as blasphemy. It became the greatest art scandal of the “Bismarck era” during a wave of anti Semitic propaganda.

Recognition of his work failed until the beginning of 20th, when he changed his motives to idlers, polo players, coffee parties and horse riding, which suited the upper class. He painted 200 motives from the garden of his summer residence “Villa

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