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 20,000 inquiries a year from all over the U.S. 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" published by YIVO in 1971 and republished later in new editions. YIVO also published the very popular and authoritative Modern Yiddish-English, English-Yiddish Dictionary by Prof. Weinreich. There are at least 25 universities offering credit courses in Yiddish and about 40 where no credits are given. YIVO maintains contact with all of them. It also maintains close contact with the Library of Congress and with the universities in Israel. It has close working relationships with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, with the Jewish Museum in New York and with the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. The Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at YIVO — which is chartered by the N.Y. State Bodkd of Regents — is an inter-university and inter- disciplinary approach to the training of young scholars and the development of research in the areas of YIVO Jewish -studies. It provides comprehensive university programs in Eastern European and American Jewish studies. It does not award degrees, but its credits are transferrable to other universities. In addition to courses offered directly at the Weinreich Center, center courses are included in the cur- riculum at Columbia University . A number of its graduates are already filling positions as teachers of Yiddish and Yiddish literature at leading academic institutions. PROJECTS AND NEEDS: The federal govenink appreciates the YIVO and gives it from time to time grants for definite projects. These grants are, however, given on a "matching" condition, so that YIVO must find means to match them in order to get them. This is no easy task. YIVO receives allocations from Jewish communities in this country through the Joint Cul- tural Appeal, to the extent of about $110,000 a year. This is only 15 percent of its yearly budget. It must cover the remainder from membership dues and with contributions from foundations. It has a devoted membership but is con- stantly struggling to meet its budget. Among the grants from Washington awarded to YIVO recently is a two-year grant (1979-1980) for its Landsman- shaften Project. The preservation of "landsmanshaften" documents is part of the program of the National Archives in Washington to record the history of the many ethnic groups that have built the United States. YIVO's project was given priority because documents from these 100- year-old Jewish societies are in danger of destruction and permanent loss as the older organizations and their leader- ship decline. .