Max Liebermann’s work is close in style to Édouard Manet with a practiced hand that demonstrated the artist’s strong understanding of realism.
He painted over 200 commissioned portraits during his lifetime, notably including one of the famed physicist Albert Einstein.
| 1847 | Max Liebermann was born the son of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer on July 20 in Berlin. |
| 1869 | Studied at the Weimar Academy of Arts |
| 1873 | Moved to Paris and Barbizon; influenced by the art of Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) and the Dutch old masters, particularly Frans Hals (between 1580 and 1585 to 1666) |
| 1874 | – 1914 Annual summer trips to Holland |
| 1878 | Moved to Munich; encountered the circle of artists around Wilhelm Leibl (1844–1900). Liebermann’s preoccupation with depicting the common tradespeople and farm labourers he had encountered in the Netherlands earned him the reputation of being a “painter of the poor”. |
| 1884 | Returned to Berlin and married Martha Marckwald |
| 1885 | Birth of daughter Käthe |
| 1889 | Participated in the Exposition Universelle in Paris, marking the 100th anniversary of the FrenchRevolution. For political reasons, the Prussian government forbade him from accepting a knighthoodfrom the French Legion of Honour. |
| 1894 | After the death of his father, he inherited the house on Pariser Platz (Berlin), where he had been living since 1892. |
| 1897 | Appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Arts at Berlin. |
| 1898 | Liebermann became president of the newly founded Berlin Secession. Together with Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, he formed the triumvirate of what was known as German Impressionism. At this time, Liebermann’s subject matter and painting style began to change: his palette became brighter, his colours more luminous. For the subject of his paintings, he turned to the middle classes in their leisure time and on trips to the beach. |
| 1909 | – 1910 The Liebermann Villa was built. From then on, Liebermann spent his summers in Wannsee. The garden inspired him to produce more than 200 oil paintings and just as many prints. |
| 1920 | – 1932 President of the Prussian Academy of Arts at Berlin |
| 1927 | Named an honorary citizen of Berlin |
| 1933 | Resigned as honorary president of the Academy of Arts upon the fine art department’s decision tostop exhibiting pictures from Jewish artists |
| 1935 | Died in his house on Pariser Platz on February 8, embittered and ostracized by the National Socialists |
Max Liebermann, painter and printmaker known for his naturalistic studies of the life and labour of the poor, was also the foremost proponent of Impressionism in Germany.
After studying under the painter Carl Steffeck from 1866 to 1868, Liebermann attended the Weimar Art School from 1868 to 1872. The straightforward realism and direct simplicity of his first exhibited picture, Women Plucking Geese (1872), presented a striking contrast to the romantically idealized art then in vogue. This picture earned him the epithet “disciple of the ugly.” Liebermann spent the summer of 1873 at the village of Barbizon, near Paris, where a group of landscape painters known as the Barbizon schoolhad been working since the 1830s. There he became acquainted with one of the leaders of the Barbizon school, Jean-François Millet, and studied the works of Camille Corot, Constant Troyon, and Charles-François Daubigny.
In 1878 Liebermann returned to Germany, living at first in Munich and finally settling in Berlin in 1884. From 1875 to 1913 he spent summers painting in the Netherlands. During this period he found his painting subjects in the orphanages and asylums forthe elderly in Amsterdam and among the peasants and urban labourers of Germany and the Netherlands. In works such as The Flax Spinners (1887), Liebermann did for German painting what Millet had done for French art, portraying scenes of rural labour in a melancholy,yet unsentimental, manner.
After 1890 Liebermann’s style was influenced by the French Impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. As Liebermann focused on Impressionist concerns of light and colour, subject matter became less important for him. However, he maintained a connection to the narrative tradition of German art, and thus, unlike the French Impressionists, he never became completely detached from subject matter. In 1899 Liebermann founded the Berliner Sezession, a group of artists who supported the academically unpopular styles of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. Despite his association with the antiestablishment Sezession, he became a member of the Berlin Academy, and in 1920 he was elected its president. In 1932 the Nazis forced him to resign from his position. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
