Lot 427 Dα

In the mid 1920s Max Liebermann was much in demand as a portrait painter. It was his sensitive combination of psychological intensity and distance that made him a sought-after portraitist. Free of sentimentality, he focussed his view on the person before him. With the goal of bringing out the characteristic qualities of the individual, he sought to emphasise their outward appearance and mentality without prettifying them.
During conversations the artist attempted to gain a closer understanding of his sitter's specific temperament, so that he could subsequently give expression to this in articulating the face and pose. At the same time, the sitter's status does not usually become visible: whether Albert Einstein, Gerhard Hauptmann or Paul von Hindenburg - Liebermann painted all of them in front of a neutral wall, provided with only a few attributes or even without any at all. As one of around two hundred portraits of outstanding figures from the areas of politics, science, art and society, the present work is a revealing document of bourgeois self-representation in Germany during the 1920s.