Max Liebermann

The son of a Jewish industrialist, Max Liebermann was born in Berlin in 1847. He was already interested in painting as a child, and received private instruction in drawing. His parents were opposed to an artistic career, however, so he first studied chemistry before attending the art school in Weimar from 1869 to 1872. In 1873 he moved to Paris, where he was inspired by its landscape painters and representatives of Realism. During one of his trips to Holland in the 1870s he came to know plein-air painting, which would influence his work from then on. In 1889 Liebermann helped to organise an unofficial participation by German artists at the Paris World’s Fair. In 1897 he was appointed a professor at Berlin’s Royal Academy of the Arts, the Königliche Akademie der Künste. A year later he was a member of the jury for the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, and founded the Berlin Secession. In 1933 the National Socialists banned him, as a Jew, from working. Liebermann died in Berlin in 1935.