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  • October 18, 2025 (Sat)

Max Liebermann Brought Impressionism to Germany: Exhibition Showcases His Pivotal Role in Transforming German Art

Sayart / Published October 18, 2025 02:11 PM
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Max Liebermann, the German painter who stood at the pinnacle of his success in the late 1920s, played a crucial role in bringing French Impressionism to Germany and establishing a distinctive German variant of the movement. The Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden is currently showcasing his profound influence on the renewal of German painting through a comprehensive exhibition that runs until February 8, 2026.

Liebermann's artistic journey began controversially in 1872 when he first publicly exhibited "The Goose Pluckers," a painting depicting women engaged in strenuous physical labor. The work drew irritated and mocking comments from viewers, as the scion of a wealthy Jewish industrial family based in Berlin had chosen to portray scenes from the daily lives of the poor. His subsequent paintings of inmates from orphanages and old men's homes in Amsterdam further cemented his reputation as a "painter of the poor."

A significant transformation occurred in Liebermann's work during the 1880s. The Impressionist movement had been launched on April 15, 1874, with an exhibition at photographer Nadar's Paris studio, and its influence gradually spread to Germany with lasting effects extending well into the 1920s. Liebermann became the leading advocate of this new artistic direction, forming an outstanding triumvirate of German Impressionism alongside Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt.

The Baden-Baden exhibition, created in cooperation with Museum Barberini in Potsdam, illuminates the characteristics that defined this artistic movement. Liebermann rightfully takes the protagonist's role, as he most distinctly adapted the stylistic features of Impressionism: the sketch-like spontaneity, the momentary quality, the intensity of light and colors, and the dissolution of contours. Under the influence of French Impressionism, which he encountered at Paul Cassirer's Berlin art salon and during stays in Paris, both Liebermann's subject matter and painting technique underwent dramatic changes.

The painter's palette brightened considerably as he shifted from realistically rendered working people to depictions of leisure life. He particularly favored painting beer gardens where men and women, young and old from various social classes, sat together sociably under the shade of chestnut trees whose leaves funneled sunlight into distinctive patterns. These sun-dappled scenes echoed his earlier orphanage and old men's home paintings from Amsterdam, but with a notably lighter palette and more luminous coloring despite the dense paint application.

At the summer coasts of Noordwijk and Scheveningen, Liebermann painted numerous variations of bathing boys and elegant riders trotting across the beaches. The Netherlands remained his preferred country both geographically and artistically. As he wrote to collector Max Linde in 1897: "There is only one country for the world of painting, c'est la Hollande."

A special position in his oeuvre is occupied by the 1902 painting "Samson and Delilah." It shows the biblical couple naked on a bed in a theatrical scene, with Delilah triumphantly holding up Samson's cut hair—the source of his strength—with her outstretched arm. This represents a strikingly effective contribution to the theme of gender warfare that was being explored in various forms in painting, literature, and opera at the time, though such a work was hardly expected from Liebermann.

Liebermann's primary concern was "peinture"—pure painting. He believed that "the specifically painterly content of a picture is greater the less interest there is in its subject itself; the more completely the content of a picture has merged into painterly form, the greater the painter." Similarly, Corinth remarked that a picture reflects not reality, but the person who made the picture. Both statements bridge the gap to the French artists, about whom art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary wrote: "They are Impressionists in the sense that they do not reproduce the landscape, but the sensation evoked by the landscape."

As he aged, the painter increasingly withdrew from representative subjects toward nature and privacy. With nearly 200 works, mostly horizon-free garden paintings became the most important motif of the last twenty years of his life. The Baden-Baden exhibition dedicates an entire large hall to this theme. In 1909, the artist had acquired an estate on Lake Wannsee, where he built a summer residence that also housed his high-quality art collection. The artfully designed garden became a major source of artistic inspiration, whether the flower garden with its gardener's cottage, the vegetable garden, the Wannsee terrace, or the birch grove. Similar to Monet in Giverny, Liebermann sought to give his paradise a painterly appearance.

When Liebermann celebrated his 80th birthday in 1927, he stood at the height of his fame. From his studio in the Liebermann Palace next to the Brandenburg Gate, he had painted portraits of the political, economic, and cultural elite of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic at top prices. He served as president of the Berlin Academy of Arts, highly regarded as both painter and collector with excellent contacts in France, and respected as an influential cultural politician, including as co-founder and first president of the Berlin Secession. The city of Berlin awarded him honorary citizenship and dedicated an exhibition of one hundred works to him.

Six years later, the Nazis came to power. Liebermann withdrew from public life, and his villa on Lake Wannsee transformed from a summer residence into a refuge. His death on February 8, 1935, went largely unnoticed. His widow was dispossessed and attempted to escape to Switzerland or Sweden, but was unsuccessful. In 1943, she preempted the threatened deportation to Theresienstadt concentration camp by suicide. Their daughter Käthe had been able to flee to the United States with her husband and daughter in 1938.

Despite Liebermann's outstanding position, German Impressionism had other significant representatives. The Burda Museum effectively presents them alongside Liebermann with often identical or similar motifs. Masterworks by Max Slevogt and Lovis Corinth are prominently featured. Corinth is represented by, among others, "Lady at the Goldfish Basin," a painting representative of bourgeois residential culture. Slevogt makes a spectacular appearance with all three role portraits of Portuguese opera singer Francisco d'Andrade in the role of Don Giovanni: the white one from Stuttgart, the red one from Berlin, and the black one from Hamburg.

The Impressionists also reinterpreted children's portraits by showing the small models as independent beings in their environment. Alongside Fritz von Uhde's "Nursery" and Slevogt's original portrait of Paul Cassirer's daughter Suzanne Aimée, several works by the then-celebrated children's portraitist Sabine Lepsius illustrate this approach. Finally, Lesser Ury's fascinating night paintings of Berlin streets fill an entire wall. The exhibition in Baden-Baden thus conveys a multi-layered picture of an artistic movement that led to abstraction in France and to Expressionism in Germany.

The exhibition "Impressionism in Germany: Max Liebermann and His Time" will subsequently be shown at Museum Barberini Potsdam. A comprehensive catalog of 288 pages is available for 39 euros, providing additional scholarly context for this significant artistic movement that fundamentally transformed German painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Max Liebermann, the German painter who stood at the pinnacle of his success in the late 1920s, played a crucial role in bringing French Impressionism to Germany and establishing a distinctive German variant of the movement. The Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden is currently showcasing his profound influence on the renewal of German painting through a comprehensive exhibition that runs until February 8, 2026.

Liebermann's artistic journey began controversially in 1872 when he first publicly exhibited "The Goose Pluckers," a painting depicting women engaged in strenuous physical labor. The work drew irritated and mocking comments from viewers, as the scion of a wealthy Jewish industrial family based in Berlin had chosen to portray scenes from the daily lives of the poor. His subsequent paintings of inmates from orphanages and old men's homes in Amsterdam further cemented his reputation as a "painter of the poor."

A significant transformation occurred in Liebermann's work during the 1880s. The Impressionist movement had been launched on April 15, 1874, with an exhibition at photographer Nadar's Paris studio, and its influence gradually spread to Germany with lasting effects extending well into the 1920s. Liebermann became the leading advocate of this new artistic direction, forming an outstanding triumvirate of German Impressionism alongside Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt.

The Baden-Baden exhibition, created in cooperation with Museum Barberini in Potsdam, illuminates the characteristics that defined this artistic movement. Liebermann rightfully takes the protagonist's role, as he most distinctly adapted the stylistic features of Impressionism: the sketch-like spontaneity, the momentary quality, the intensity of light and colors, and the dissolution of contours. Under the influence of French Impressionism, which he encountered at Paul Cassirer's Berlin art salon and during stays in Paris, both Liebermann's subject matter and painting technique underwent dramatic changes.

The painter's palette brightened considerably as he shifted from realistically rendered working people to depictions of leisure life. He particularly favored painting beer gardens where men and women, young and old from various social classes, sat together sociably under the shade of chestnut trees whose leaves funneled sunlight into distinctive patterns. These sun-dappled scenes echoed his earlier orphanage and old men's home paintings from Amsterdam, but with a notably lighter palette and more luminous coloring despite the dense paint application.

At the summer coasts of Noordwijk and Scheveningen, Liebermann painted numerous variations of bathing boys and elegant riders trotting across the beaches. The Netherlands remained his preferred country both geographically and artistically. As he wrote to collector Max Linde in 1897: "There is only one country for the world of painting, c'est la Hollande."

A special position in his oeuvre is occupied by the 1902 painting "Samson and Delilah." It shows the biblical couple naked on a bed in a theatrical scene, with Delilah triumphantly holding up Samson's cut hair—the source of his strength—with her outstretched arm. This represents a strikingly effective contribution to the theme of gender warfare that was being explored in various forms in painting, literature, and opera at the time, though such a work was hardly expected from Liebermann.

Liebermann's primary concern was "peinture"—pure painting. He believed that "the specifically painterly content of a picture is greater the less interest there is in its subject itself; the more completely the content of a picture has merged into painterly form, the greater the painter." Similarly, Corinth remarked that a picture reflects not reality, but the person who made the picture. Both statements bridge the gap to the French artists, about whom art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary wrote: "They are Impressionists in the sense that they do not reproduce the landscape, but the sensation evoked by the landscape."

As he aged, the painter increasingly withdrew from representative subjects toward nature and privacy. With nearly 200 works, mostly horizon-free garden paintings became the most important motif of the last twenty years of his life. The Baden-Baden exhibition dedicates an entire large hall to this theme. In 1909, the artist had acquired an estate on Lake Wannsee, where he built a summer residence that also housed his high-quality art collection. The artfully designed garden became a major source of artistic inspiration, whether the flower garden with its gardener's cottage, the vegetable garden, the Wannsee terrace, or the birch grove. Similar to Monet in Giverny, Liebermann sought to give his paradise a painterly appearance.

When Liebermann celebrated his 80th birthday in 1927, he stood at the height of his fame. From his studio in the Liebermann Palace next to the Brandenburg Gate, he had painted portraits of the political, economic, and cultural elite of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic at top prices. He served as president of the Berlin Academy of Arts, highly regarded as both painter and collector with excellent contacts in France, and respected as an influential cultural politician, including as co-founder and first president of the Berlin Secession. The city of Berlin awarded him honorary citizenship and dedicated an exhibition of one hundred works to him.

Six years later, the Nazis came to power. Liebermann withdrew from public life, and his villa on Lake Wannsee transformed from a summer residence into a refuge. His death on February 8, 1935, went largely unnoticed. His widow was dispossessed and attempted to escape to Switzerland or Sweden, but was unsuccessful. In 1943, she preempted the threatened deportation to Theresienstadt concentration camp by suicide. Their daughter Käthe had been able to flee to the United States with her husband and daughter in 1938.

Despite Liebermann's outstanding position, German Impressionism had other significant representatives. The Burda Museum effectively presents them alongside Liebermann with often identical or similar motifs. Masterworks by Max Slevogt and Lovis Corinth are prominently featured. Corinth is represented by, among others, "Lady at the Goldfish Basin," a painting representative of bourgeois residential culture. Slevogt makes a spectacular appearance with all three role portraits of Portuguese opera singer Francisco d'Andrade in the role of Don Giovanni: the white one from Stuttgart, the red one from Berlin, and the black one from Hamburg.

The Impressionists also reinterpreted children's portraits by showing the small models as independent beings in their environment. Alongside Fritz von Uhde's "Nursery" and Slevogt's original portrait of Paul Cassirer's daughter Suzanne Aimée, several works by the then-celebrated children's portraitist Sabine Lepsius illustrate this approach. Finally, Lesser Ury's fascinating night paintings of Berlin streets fill an entire wall. The exhibition in Baden-Baden thus conveys a multi-layered picture of an artistic movement that led to abstraction in France and to Expressionism in Germany.

The exhibition "Impressionism in Germany: Max Liebermann and His Time" will subsequently be shown at Museum Barberini Potsdam. A comprehensive catalog of 288 pages is available for 39 euros, providing additional scholarly context for this significant artistic movement that fundamentally transformed German painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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