Artists

Max Liebermann was a prominent German painter and printmaker known for championing Impressionism in Germany and collecting French Impressionist art. He studied art in Weimar, Paris, and the Netherlands, settling in Berlin in 1884. Liebermann depicted bourgeois life and his garden near Lake Wannsee in his work. Renowned for portraits, he created over 200, including those of Albert Einstein and Paul von Hindenburg. Honoured with exhibitions and academy membership, he led the Berlin Secession from 1899 to 1911. In 1933, he resigned from the academy when it barred Jewish artists. His art collection was looted by the Nazis. Liebermann advocated for art’s separation from politics, which drew criticism from conservatives.

In 2005/2006, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the Jewish Museum in New York showcased the first major U.S. exhibition of Liebermann’s art. In 2006, the Max Liebermann Society established a permanent museum in the Liebermann family’s former villa in Berlin’s Wannsee district. Martha Liebermann, the artist’s wife, tragically committed suicide in 1943 rather than face deportation to Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Israel Museum returned one of Liebermann’s paintings to his estate in 2011; it had been looted from a Jewish museum in Nazi Germany, where he had loaned it in the 1930s. This act symbolised the recovery of lost art from World War II.