Avant-Garde:

“Stern, liberal, conservative, radical”: rarely has Max Liebermann been captured more tersely or more incisively than in these four seemingly antithetical adjectives. They speak to his origins, to his art—and to the Impressionist network of which he became the fulcrum. He belonged to an avant-garde elite that reinvented everything, yet continued to prize the representational tradition.

One perceives this with particular clarity in Max Liebermann’s self-portraits—even in this late, somewhat weary example of 1934: he remained, always, a bourgeois artist. His aesthetic evolved through diligence and creative fervor, with order and audacity held in poised equilibrium. At the same time, he belonged to the first Jewish generation tentatively permitted to become part of German society.

Altogether, 116 works by 25 artists—including Max Liebermann—from over 50 international collections have been brought together. Among them are paintings by six female Impressionists: Charlotte Berend-Corinth, Emilie von Hallavanya, Dora Hitz, Sabine Lepsius, Maria Slavona, and Eva Stort.

Women played a subtle yet decisive role at the time, even though they were not yet permitted to study formally. In subsequent reception, however, their contributions were effectively erased—fortunately, no longer today.

These paintings by Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt, and Lesser Ury. They reveal what was perhaps the defining element of Impressionism in Europe—though it assumed different inflections in France, Germany, Holland, or Russia. Everywhere, however, the sovereignty of color prevailed. ith it came an atmospheric shimmer of brushwork previously unknown: objects dissolved into color and light, and color and light themselves became the true subjects of painting.

In the conservative German Empire of the 1870s, academic studio painting reigned supreme. Later, Max Liebermann would derisively call it “brown gravy,” a reference to its heavy, dark tonalities. It was a painting of mythologized landscapes, of dignified and representative portraiture, of grand historical tableaux. And it was art in the service of the state.

France—where, almost unnoticed, a new Impressionist painting was emerging from the plein-air spirit of Barbizon—had just been defeated in the war of 1870–71. Officially, the country was still regarded less as Germany’s hereditary friend than as its hereditary foe.

Others, however, remained loyal to those who had failed to recognize Liebermann’s early promise. In the 1870s, for instance, The Goose-Girls, and in the 1880s, The Net-Menders—works that today are rightly celebrated as untouchable masterpieces in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Contemporary criticism, often laced with overt antisemitism or outright hostility toward Jews, dismissed Liebermann as a “painter of filth,” a “painter of the poor,” an “apostle of ugliness,” revealing as much about the prejudice of his detractors as about his art.

Although the French remained a source of antipathy for many patriotic Germans, their country nonetheless offered a wealth of innovation: democratic-republican ideals, emancipation movements, groundbreaking literature, Paris as the epitome of modern urban existence—and the most cutting-edge art of the day.

Prior to the National Gallery’s acquisitions, the private gallery of Fritz Gurlitt had already showcased contemporary French art as early as 1883. At the turn of the century, both the Berlin Secession, organized around Max Liebermann, and the Cassirer Art Salon repeatedly exhibited works by Claude Monet and Édouard Manet—Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe notably appearing in Berlin in 1900. These exhibitions stood in deliberate opposition to academic painting and to the German emperor’s assertions of a national artistic canon.

German artists eagerly traveled to France, where they sought inspiration in both nature and the modern city. There—just as elsewhere across Europe—they discovered new subjects: laborers and bourgeois citizens, railway stations and metropolitan streets; everyday roads, fields, and rivers; trees in radiant bloom. What had once lingered at the margins of painting now moved decisively to its center.

A dismissal of the old Salon and academic painting tradition: In a letter to his colleague Gotthardt Kuehl following the pivotal Paris World’s Fair of 1889, Liebermann mockingly referred to the “brown sauce,” by which he meant the muddy brown tonality characteristic of academic painting.

Max Liebermann was a Realist who nonetheless invoked the autonomy of Impressionist painting. In 1903, in a letter to the art critic Emil Heilbut, he described it as a “painting made for its own sake […] freed from any purpose.”

The transformation of Paris from the 1850s onward established a new model of the modern metropolis. Berlin followed suit with the Hobrecht Plan of 1862. The creation of wide sidewalks and tree-lined avenues did not immediately lead to traffic chaos; rather, it ushered in the era of the strolling flâneur.

At the same time, the night was conquered with modern gas and electric lighting. Nighttime cafés drew society into their glow. And the mood—the “nervous energy” of the big city, as it was already called—was perhaps captured in Germany better than anywhere else by Lesser Ury. Ury’s artificial lights—street lamps, carriage lamps, spotlights—vibrate in a world that is often dark. It is not as quiet as the light of other Impressionists. It is expressive, almost loud. “The city that never sleeps,” people said of New York in 1912. In a way, that has applied to every metropolis ever since.

The new enjoyment of strolling—through parks and by lakes—belonged to both the modern city and the nation. Lovis Corinth’s The New Lake, pictured at the very beginning of this prologue, depicts a cloudy day when the boathouse remained closed, offering a quiet backdrop to the city’s weekend leisure.

Key’s book was a bestseller in the German Empire. She focused on the bourgeois parent–child relationship, urging a responsible approach to the next generation.

With her critique of corporal punishment and religious instruction, and with her vision against the “murder of the soul,” aiming to transform schools into places of inspiration, Ellen Key inspired both female and male artists alike.

In his unfinished The Arcades Project, the philosopher Walter Benjamin described the nineteenth century as “obsessed with dwelling.” The rapid ascent of the bourgeoisie fostered an intensified focus on the private sphere—on the home and its garden as the center of bourgeois life.

These bourgeois homes—first discovered by the French Impressionists and soon followed by their German counterparts—became the principal sites of the new art. The everyday lives of the artists themselves, members of the bourgeoisie, likewise came to be considered worthy subjects of representation. One need only look to the villa of Max Liebermann at Liebermann Villa am Wannsee: from the house and its adjoining reform garden—developed together with Alfred Lichtwark—approximately two hundred paintings survive.

Scenes of private domestic happiness played a central role in the work of Lovis Corinth. In 1904 he married his student Charlotte Berend-Corinth, who frequently served as his model. During a four-day painting session in 1911 he created the interior Lady by the Goldfish Basin: Charlotte seated in a bay window adorned with lush green plants, absorbed in reading. The entire interior is animated by a playful, shimmering light.

Scenes of private family happiness played a prominent role in the work of Lovis Corinth. In 1904, he married his student Charlotte Berend-Corinth, who frequently served as his model. During a four-day painting session in 1911, he created the interior Lady by the Goldfish Basin: Charlotte seated in a bay window adorned with lush green plants, absorbed in reading. The entire interior is enlivened by a playful, shimmering light.

The motif of Max Slevogt’s Abduction of a Woman appears almost traditional—one might think of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Rape of the Sabine Women. Yet Slevogt ultimately approaches the subject quite differently: his female figure seems less defenseless than faintly amused, while the straining man appears almost a little ridiculous.

What is striking is the almost two-meter force of the composition. All the more so since the background of this burlesque—set within a palm house—is rendered in only a few energetic brushstrokes, indeed veritable slashes of the brush. Max Slevogt was a man of the theater, working among other projects for the Kammerspiele Berlin of Max Reinhardt in Berlin. One senses that his painting would still command attention from the very last row of a stage.

The theater—shaped in part by innovators such as Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen—served at the time as a central arena of bourgeois self-representation. Film had already been invented, yet the age of cinema was still to come. In The Black d’Andrade, Max Slevogt depicts the final scene of Don Giovanni, in which Don Giovanni extends his hand to the stone spirit—clad in a brightly glowing yellow doublet. “d’Andrade” was the name of the celebrated opera singer Francisco d'Andrade. 

Lovis Corinth had already begun exploring themes of the battle between the sexes in the 1890s. The biblical story of Salome—who demands the head of John the Baptist—became an emblem of the perceived threat posed by female sexuality. The motif gained further prominence through the play Salome by Oscar Wilde and the opera Salome by Richard Strauss. Corinth, in turn, rendered the subject with remarkable affinity, for instance in a version painted in 1903.

Max Liebermann’s painting Samson and Delilah remains sketchily open, as if the story of man and woman were still unfolding. Indeed, such works—and others like them—reflect the influence of the “new women” around the turn of the century, who were increasingly asserting their rights and demanding greater social and cultural agency.

After the death of his father in 1894, Max Liebermann inherited financial independence. In 1909, he purchased a Neoclassical villa at Wannsee, where he created a magnificent garden. From 1915 onward, this garden became the primary subject of his painting: flower beds, kitchen gardens, gardener’s cottages, the Wannsee terrace, and stands of birch trees—rendered in some 200 canvases.

The series of individual motifs and the intense focus on his own garden recall Monet’s now world-famous water lily pond at Giverny and the paintings it inspired. For Liebermann, who was Jewish, his garden increasingly became a private refuge from the resurgent antisemitism from the 1920s onward.

After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, the painter anticipated the new regime by resigning his position as Honorary President of the Academy of Arts. Max Liebermann died in 1935. His widow, Martha Liebermann, took her own life in 1943, just days before her scheduled deportation to a concentration camp. Their daughter Käthe and granddaughter Maria had fled to the United States.

When Max Liebermann—Germany’s foremost Impressionist—was buried in 1935 at the Jewish Cemetery on Schönhauser Allee in Berlin, only a handful of friends dared to attend the final farewell.

Today, Liebermann’s artist villa at Wannsee stands as a significant cultural legacy: both the culmination and endpoint of the first German avant-garde movement. Yet it also serves as a solemn political memorial.