12 Friday, November 9, 1919
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Max Liebermann Forgotten Jewish Master
By JOSEPH GUTMANN
•CD
West Berlin's National-
galerie has mounted a
major exhibition devoted to
Max Liebermann and his
times. A beautiful
catalogue issued on the oc-
casion reproduces in color
more than 130 drawings,
pastels and prints. The in-
clusion of scholarly essays
by leading experts on differ-
ent aspects of Liebermann's
art and life make this
catalogue a definitive work
on Liebermann.
Liebermann was consid-
ered one of the most impor-
tant painters of pre-Nazi
Germany. Unfortunately,
he is hardly known in this
country, and few of his
works are in public U.S.
museums.
Born in 1847, the son of a
wealthy Jewish cotton mill
owner, Liebermann hardly
fits the stereotyped picture
of the Bohemian artist. He
himself wrote: "In my
habits I am the most perfect
bourgeois. I eat, drink,
sleep, take a stroll with the
regularity of a tower clock. I
live in the house (actually a
mansion next to the famous
Berlin Brandenburg Gate)
where I spent my childhood
and it would be hard for me
to live elsewhere."
Indeed, his Bohemian
confreres considered him
a bourgeois, while con-
temporary artists looked
upon him as a reactio-
nary, and anti-Semites
emphasized that he was a
Jew.
His work displays a dis-
taste for the huge, jingois-
tic, patriotic court and
battle pictures and the sac-
charine genre scenes so
much in vogue in Wilhel-
minian society. For inspira-
tion, Liebermann turned
from industrial Germany
and its many problems to
peaceful, burgeois Holland,
which seemed to care'for its
poor, old and orphans.
Liebermann loved to por-
tray the Dutch toiler of the
land, the weaver and
lacemaker, as well as or-
phans and old people.
He ignored sentiment and
romance in his paintings
and depicted life as is, free
from pose and affectation.
Liebermann was deeply
influenced by a fellow Jew,
the Dutch painter Jozef Is-
, raels, and the French artists
Millet and Courbet, with
whom he shared realistic
portrayals of the lower
classes. His genre scenes,
however, reveal no trace of
empathy or social protest
against man's inhumanity.
Although Liebermann was
often called an Im-
pressionist he has little in
common with the French
school other than his plain
air paintings.
JOSEPH GUTMANN
He did not use the
Spectrum Pallete, which
allowed light to dissolve
the form. During the last
20 years of his life, when
he could no longer jour-
ney to Holland, he turned
for inspiration to the pic-
torial riches offered by
Wannsee, his resplendent
summer home near a
lake.
It is these later paintings
that show his indebtedness
to Impressionism. In addi-
tion, he was one of the first
in Germany to purchase
Impressionist paintings of
Monet and Pisarro for his
fine private collection.
rightly dubbed a "literal,
comical melodrama." In
addition, he produced a
series of lithographs for
Heinrich Heine's "rabbi of
Bacherach."
When in 1902 Moses Ep-
hraim Lilien (the cultural
Zionist artist, who along
with Boris Schatz and Mar-
tin Buber wanted to create a
distinctly Jewish art at the
turn of the century) gave
Liebermann a copy of a
newly-published Bible con-
taining his etchings,
Liebermann thanked him
profusely, but told him he
found nothing Jewish in his
etchings.
"For me," he wrote, "there
exists no. Jewish or Chris-
tian art . . . As with Social
Democrats, so in art the slo-
gan should be: 'Religion is a
private affair.' "
Yet, Liebermann was
quick to speak out against
prejudice. when George
Bernard Shaw once stated
that "those Jews who still
want to be the chosen race
— chosen by the late Lord
Balfour — can go to Pales-
tine and stew in their own
juice. The rest had better
stop being Jews and start
becoming human beings."
MAX LIEBERMANN
What do we know about
Liebermann the Jew?
Judaism and Jewish subject
matter are only occasion-
ally encountered in the ar-
tist's large oeuvre.
Liebermann made some
portrait drawings and etch-
ings of Jews such as Albert
Einstein, the Jewish
_ philosopher Herman Co-
hen, and the poet Hayim
Nahman Bialik, as well as
quite a few sketches and oil
paintings of the bustling,
noisy market of the Joden-
breestraat (Jewish quarter)
of Amsterdam, which fasci-
nated him.
He painted only one bibli-
cal scene — an unconscious
Samson shorn by a nude De-
lilah — which has been
To this, Liebermann shar-
ply retorted: "That which
Bernard Shaw says about
the chosen people, inas-
- much as he is not witty, is
simply stupid. He knows
very well, or at least he
ought to know, that Jews
demand nothing special or
exceptional: only justice —
the
, right to exist, like citi-
zens-ef other faiths."
Once Liebermann told
one of his portrait sitters,
the German ambassador
to England, Prince
Lichnowsky, that his
skull reminded him of
Jewish prisoners on an
old Assyrian relief. When
the nobleman furiously
protested: "If you please,
I happen to belong to the
oldest Polish-German
aristocracy!" Lieber-
mann shouted back, "If
you please, I belong to a
still older nobility!"
When the Nazis came to
power in 1933, Liebermann
resigned his prestigious
position as president of the
Prussian Academy of Arts.
Looking out his window at
the swelling Nazi hordes, he
said: "I can't eat as much, as
I'd like to vomit!"
To his friend, Prof. Franz
Landsberger, later director
of the Hebrew Union Col-
lege Museum in Cincinnati,
he confided in a letter: "The
gift of the prophetic tongue
is still in our bones . . . To-
day, however, when the
Nazis comport themselves
-like drunken barbarians we
must quietly pursue our
daily occupations."
In 1931, when Meir Di-
zengoff, mayor of Tel Aviv,
sent the 81-year-old artist
birthday greetings, he re-
plied: "Though I have,
throughout my life, consid-
ered myself a German, I was
much aware of my belong-
ing to the Jewish people .. .
Though not a Zionist, for I
belong to an earlier genera-
tion, I watch the great goals
at which it aims with the
greatest interest."
Two years later,
Liebermann's illusions
about a peaceful sym-
biosis of German and
Jew were rudely shat-
tered. Deeply touched
that the Tel Aviv Museum
wanted to name a gallery
in his honor he thanked
Bialik and Dizengoff and
said that he was no
longer removed from
Zion and would migrate
to Palestine, but "alas,
you can't transplant so
old a tree."
Nevertheless, he felt corn-
forted by the Jewish hand
extended to those "who (like
myself) clung to the dream
of assimilation."
Again to his friend Land-
sberger, he wrote in 1934:
"From the beautiful dream
of assimilation we have
been, alas, awakened most
violently. For young Jewish
people I see no solution ex-
cept migration to Palestine,
where they will be able to
live as free men . . ."
Honorary citizen of Be-
rlin, bearer of the eagle
plaque (the highest decora-
tion of the German Repub-
lic), hailed by critics as one
of the "most German",
among living artists,
Liebermann died a--
broken-hearted man in
February 1935.
Kaethe Kollwitz, Kon-
rad Von Kardoff and
Hans Purrmann were the
only Aryans who fol-
lowed the coffin to the
old Jewish cemetery of
Berlin.
It is gratifying to see
Germany restoring one of
its Jewish masters to his
rightful place by making
him known toa new genera-
tion. Hopefully, an Ameri-
can museum will see fit to
introduce this forgotten ar-
tist's work to an American
audience.
Boris Smolar's
`Between You
. . and Me'
Editor-in-Chief
Emeritus, JTA
(Copyright 1979, JTA, Inc..)
YIVO ACTION: Much is being written now on the
need to strengthen Jewish continuity through knowledge
of the Jewish past. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
— which starts its 53rd annual convention Saturday .-
New York — does just that.
YIVO conducts research into all phases of Jewish life,
but specializes in Jewish life and history in countries of
Eastern Europe where the great majority of the Jewish
people lived for centuries until the Nazi annihilation of six
million of them. It also concentrates on the Holocaust, on
the period of mass immigration of Jews to the United
States, and on Yiddish language, literature and folklore. It
conducts scholarly explorations of historical, sociological,
economic, literary, linguistic, psychological, educational
and statistical aspects of Jewish life. Its research reports
and other material are usually published in Yiddish and in
English.
No American author writing a book on Jewish life in
America of yesterday and today can afford not to spend
considerable time in the YIVO library and archives in New
York to study the records of the contemporary Jewish past.
The YIVO library contains more than 320,000 volumes; its
archives comprise over 2,000,000 individual documents,
communal records, microfilms and more than 100,000
photographs of Jewish life throughout the world over the
past century.
YIVO maintains services providing Jewish com-
munities in the U.S. and Canada, Jewish centers, libraries,
and local branches of Jewish national organizations with
special exhibits, information and guidance for cultural and
study programs. It has received numerous credits for pro-
viding source materials for major network television pro-
grams and for the legitimate theater. It has a special Yid-
dish theater archive with thousands of posters, scripts,
music sheets" and recordings. It receives an average of
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INFLUENCE ON CAMPUS: With Yiddish language
and literature now being taught in many American univer-
sities, the role of YIVO in providing texts and resources for
Yiddish courses is recognized with praise by many college
and university instructors. The most popular textbook used
by students is Prof. Uriel Weinreich's "College Yiddish"
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editions. YIVO also published the very popular and
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There are at least 25 universities offering credit
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The Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish
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