Max Liebermann

There he analysed the painting of Rembrandt, who had a great influence on his own work. 

In 1871 he made his first trip to Holland, a country he visited every year until 1913. In the Dusseldorf studio of the painter Mihály Munkácsy, Liebermann was inspired by his depictions of realistic everyday scenes to produce his most famous early work "Gänseupferinnen" in 1872. From 1873 to 1878 he lived primarily in Paris and Barbizon, the stronghold of avant-garde artistic production. With the German-French war still fresh in people's minds, he was unable to make the desired contact with the French avant-garde. However he did learn the method of plein air painting, and developed it for himself further. With this, the foundation of his impressionist vision was laid. He subsequently returned to Germany and settled in Munich. 

No artist can escape scandal

Shortly after, he began working on one of his potentially scandalous pictures "Der zwölfjährige Jesus im Tempel". The fact that Lieberman himself was a Jew played a key role here. He was denied the right to depict Jesus in this way. The Augsburger Allgemine wrote that the artist had painted "the ugliest, most impudent Jewish boy imaginable" as Jesus. Lieberman painted over the picture because he could not stand the pressure, but the episode nevertheless made him famous as an artist. 

Initially rejected in Germany as a "painter of dirt" because of his realistic depictions from the working and farming milieu, he received positive resonance with the 1881/1882 pictures "Altmännerhaus in Amsterdam" and "Freistunde im Amsterdamer Waisenhaus" in which he presents the sunlight as flecks of light, thereby achieving a particular liveliness. In 1884 the artist moved back to his hometown, and his naturalistic painting became increasingly freer. 

Finally things look up - Max Lieberman shapes German modernism

He found an important sponsor in Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, who mediated the first of his portrait commissions in 1891, to be followed by many more pictures of the bourgeoisie and well-known personalities such as Gerhard Hauptmann. His mounting success as an artist led to his appointment as professor at the Berliner Akademie in 1897. In the years following, he was one of the founding members of the Berliner Secession and was its president from 1899 to 1911. Around the turn of the century he increasingly turned to scenes from beach life, upper class pastimes as well as views of gardens. The elaborately designed garden at his villa on Wannsee would become the primary motif for his impressionistic paintings and pastels from 1910 onwards. Following conflicts with Emil Nolde and Lovis Corinth, he withdrew from the Berliner Secession in 1913. In 1920 he was appointed President of the Akademie der Künste, a position he had to give up in 1933 on account of his Jewish background. Until his death in 1935, he resided in the palace on Pariser Platz, now known as the Max-Lieberman-Haus, close to the Brandenburger Tor. 

A stroke of luck for the arts: Liebermann’s garden

Max Liebermann was just in time. When the great Impressionist acquired a plot of land on the banks of the Berlin Wannsee in 1909, the enthusiasm for a garden of one’s own and the picturesquely rustic lifestyle outside metropoles such as Berlin had already triggered a move to the countryside. Große Seestraße 24, today Colomierstraße 3, was one of the last waterfront plots on the Wannsee still available for purchase. 

A stroke of luck for the painter and his family. For the desire for a country summer villa had attracted wealthy Berliners to the south since its genesis in the mid-19th century, and had continued to grow in strength, accelerated and systemised by the investor Wilhelm Conrad’s Alsen villa settlement. His entrepreneurial activities in this context would be described today as that of a real estate developer. 

It was only in a second wave, starting in the Gründerzeit, that the Wannsee bank in particular was developed. The Wannsee railway provided an easy connection to the area which at that time still lay outside the city. Here, the villas were even larger and their gardens even more splendid, and the clientele attracted there were correspondingly so: prominent  citizens such as the publishers Carl Langenscheidt and Ferdinand Springer or the physician Ferdinand Sauerbruch lived in Liebermann’s immediate neighbourhood. Eduard Arnhold, one of the greatest patrons of his time, was probably the most important neighbour in this  illustrious Wannsee society when it comes to the arts. His collection included Liebermann’s paintings alongside works by Manet, Monet, van Gogh and other international artists as  well as the most famous German painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The house which Max Liebermann built in the midst of this community followed models in Hamburg. One of the mains reasons for this connection lay in the artist’s friendship with the then director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark, who showed his Berlin visitor various summer residences in Hamburg, two of which became models for Liebermann’s Wannsee project. 

The fact that Liebermann created the garden together with Alfred Lichtwark, already  indicated that this project was, of course, also about painting. Lichtwark was not only a good friend of Liebermann, but was involved in the planning of the garden, and proved himself early on to be a champion of the new reform ideas which sought to replace the shape of the landscaped garden. He later worked with architects on the design of Hamburg City Park, which was presented to the Hamburg Senate in 1908, the year before Liebermann arrived at the Wannsee. The aspect of usability played an essential role, for the intended use of the garden at Wannsee was admittedly different to that of the park in Hamburg. There, the aim was to provide an optimal recreational opportunity for the inhabitants of the ever more densely populated city, whilst the villa on the outskirts of Berlin was intended to benefit not only the residents, but also the artist’s work. 

Liebermann’s purchase of the plot thus also proved to be a stroke of luck for art history. It has the villa, and, as well as the garden, some of the most beautiful and atmospheric works  of German Impressionism. The garden was Liebermann’s inspiration and motif for around 200 pictures. After the outbreak of the war in 1914 in particular, Liebermann’s usual trips to the Netherlands could not continue, and he found summery motifs instead at his ‘castle by the lake’. Only ten kilometers from the City Palace in Berlin, it offered Liebermann a resort amidst plants and light beneath deciduous trees for which Monet had to travel over 80 kilometers from Paris to reach Giverny. In some summers of the 1870s, Liebermann himself had also  had to travel a distance of 60 kilometers from his own studio in Montmartre to rural Barbizon.