LIEBERMANN, REDISCOVERED

...Only three "Aryan" colleagues attended the funeral— Kaethe Kollwitz, Hans Purrmann, and Konrad von Kardorff, decent, courageous individuals...

...Both Mann and Liebermann looked more like cultivated bankers or diplomats than like artists...

...His family and friends would have had the satisfaction of seeing his remains interred in an Ehrengrab, an honorary grave supplied by his native Berlin whose Ehrenbuerger (honorary citizen) he had been for a long time...

...Two years later, the 100th anniversary of the master's birth was commemorated in the leading German papers, and in 1954 a large memorial show, featuring more than 120 items, was opened at Hanover...

...helpful in the development of a man...

...I have mentioned the self-portrait in the Tate Gallery...

...He was a brilliant conversationalist...

...Moreover, quite a few Liebermanns that had been sold abroad by destitute refugees have been acquired by German public institutions since 1945...

...Liebermann, Rediscovered by Alfred Werner Had he been fortunate enough to die before that fateful day in 1933 when Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reich, Max Liebermann, the famous painter, would have been spared a great deal of suffering...

...his sharp tongue fashioned epigrams that are sparkling today, a quarter of a century after his death, among German-speaking people the world over...

...Liebermann was about forty when he changed his way of painting...

...Thus he emerges as a first-rate figure, a solid craftsman, a sensitive creator and retainer of moods and atmospheres, a cosmopolitan who defeated the narrow provincialism of Nineteeneth Century German art, a lover of truth who refused to paint either nature or man "en dimanche," as the French say, prettied up in Sunday clothes...

...he could afford to paint himself unflatteringly (he was as "ugly" as Rembrandt or Van Gogh...

...He rarely painted women, and, when he did, they never attained the charming beauty of Renoir's ladies...

...He also liked the bustling crowds in Amsterdam's old Jewish section...

...the decisive factor is the greatness and strength of the artistic personality...

...He has edited a number of art books, and his articles have appeared in Commentary, The American Scholar, and Arts...

...From his viewpoint, he was perfectly right when, counterattacking those who had accused him of poverty of imagination, he declared (in his Credo of 1922): "It is one of the gravest, and therefore most inexcusable, aesthetic misconceptions to imagine that the more faithfully a painter depicts reality, the less he is a visionary...

...The tide washes over it frequently, and sometimes it seems to have disappeared completely...

...the pictures are closer to Pissarro than to Monet...

...Silvery blues blend with olive-green and flaming orange to create a vivid impression of the universal light caught in the prism of a small space...

...Again and again he painted his garden, saturating himself with the deep color of the flowers, the cool, moist air, the perspective of the lawn...

...He was an energetic organizer who played a prominent role in the anti-academic movements of the Nineties and early years of this century, especially in the Berlin Sezession and the Deutscher Kuensterbund...

...No, the majority of the pictures had survived in the vaults, either because museum directors were aware of the intrinsic aesthetic value of Lieber-mann's work and were eager to hide it from the Nazi barbarians, or because they wanted to play safe— should the Third Reich ever collapse, a Liebermann might serve as an excellent alibi, a great help in de-Nazification procedures...

...But this appearance was as deceptive in Liebermann's case as it was in Mann's...

...Among the pictures I recently saw in Germany, the one that made the strongest impression upon me was Liebermann's portrait of the famous surgeon, Sauerbruch, in the Hamburg museum...

...By now he had achieved an unsurpassed mastery and freedom of expression...

...but then the water recedes and the stone reappears, unchanged but for additional luster and radiance...

...More recently, Sir Herbert Read, the British art historian, called Liebermann "one of the grand old men of European art," and in France, Marcel Brion hailed the "discreet poetry" in the work of this "cultured artist of cosmopolitan tastes," but so far, no modern American critic has come forward to save Liebermann from oblivion...

...The Liebermann house on Pariser Platz was subsequently looted, and the precious collection of Impressionists stolen and dispersed...

...Although he had only tenuous links with Judaism, he was buried in a Jewish cemetery...

...The explanation is that, though a man of the world, Liebermann was a bit unsure of himself in the presence of young, pretty women...

...The octogenarian's skin is yellowish, his lips are sadly turned downward, the eyes are still penetrating, bespeaking a great wisdom acquired in a long, busy life...

...The woman replied, "To be happy is not the greatest thing in life...

...he was not afraid of himself...

...He was rich and in his thirties married the daughter of a wealthy Berlin jeweler...

...Had he remained in Berlin, perhaps, he would never have discovered the thrill of atmospheric changes, of sunlight intermingling with mist, of blue haze, of quiet empty spaces...

...He chose polo riders in action, youths bathing in the surf, horses shying at the waves...

...Liebermann was a sensitive person, and he was an outstanding artist who fully deserves having his pictures hung in all the German museums and in the public collections of Vienna, Prague, Paris, Florence, London, and New York...

...Above all, he was a clever businessman, able to convince his patrons, who included Germany's nobility and captains of industry, that they had to pay a stiff price for the privilege of owning a Liebermann...

...He compared Liebermann to a large stone lying on the beach...

...Gradually, the large groups of people in his canvases give way to smaller ones, then to one person in a landscape, and finally, even that one disappeared, to leave nothing but the mystery of nature unadulterated by the tricks of man...

...His garden pictures, especially the last ones, from which flowers flash like so many jewels, are glories of color...

...I, for one, prefer his self-portraits to most of his other works...

...Before then, he had never painted outdoors, spontaneously sur le motif, but only in the studio, after careful preliminary sketches from nature...

...Whereas in his earlier pictures bright colors were usually set off against dark tones, here they are allowed to blend harmoniously with the rich green foliage, the light tones of the gravel paths and the terraces...

...He was referring to a recent self portrait (now in London's Tate Gallery), which is as touching as are the sorrowful old Rembrandt's renderings of "his face, and to the paintings of the flower beds in the garden of the Liebermann villa at Wannsee, more spontaneous, more glowing in color than anything he had produced before...

...It is nonsensical to believe—as many young people do—that the art of our grandfathers has automatically become worthless because of the creations of new generations...

...I was reminded of these facts last spring when I made a tour of museums in the West German Republic...

...For all his sharp tongue and his worldli-ness...

...I do not want only to draw attention to the current Liebermann renaissance in the Bonn Republic, which is a hopeful sign that racial nonsense is no longer so prevalent, but to acquaint Americans with the significance of a master whose name means nothing to nine out of ten American art lovers, and to urge American museums to put their Liebermanns on the walls again, however "old-fashioned" his work may appear to those hotspurs for whom art starts with Jackson Pollock...

...The press ignored it...

...He was a bourgeois without vices...

...There is motion, light, atmosphere, and yet the form is preserved...

...Forty-odd years ago, an American critic hailed Liebermann as "the most important of living German artists, and one of the greatest painters of today in any land," but does anyone still remember the writer, James Gibbons Huneker...

...Liebermann loved and bought works by the French Impressionists, but he was never himself, strictly speaking, an Impressionist...

...There was color and movement...

...By contrast, in France, where Millet and Courbet had already prepared the way for art dealing with the "plain" people, Women Plucking Geese—a dozen peasant women in a gloomy room plucking birds in their laps while a man is carrying in more geese—was greeted with enthusiasm...

...When Liebermann died at eighty-eight, in 1935, few people took notice of the event...

...He smiled and said, "You know, I really believe that my work has improved...

...He must be measured, not by the yardstick of the Hartungs, the Winters, and other exponents of abstract art, but by those of Realism and Impressionism...

...While Liebermann managed to probe deeply into the personality of Sauerbruch, in most of his portraits he did not bother to get deeply involved emotionally...

...Eventually, his frequent sojourns in Dutch fishing villages had a cumulative effect upon him...

...From there, he would travel a few miles westward, to the windswept dunes along the North Sea, catching the mood of that gray, deserted region...

...His huge canvas, Women Plucking Geese, caused an uproar, for in the Germany of the 1870's no "self-respecting" artist ever approached such a plebeian motif...

...he seems to have been basically a shy, repressed person, masking his feelings by an intellectual approach disguised in slangy Berlinese...

...Had a miracle happened...

...All his pictures were removed from the walls of German museums...

...He was an industrious worker who finished enough oils, etchings, lithographs, and drawings to fill several museums...

...When the director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, though himself a Storm Trooper, dared to include two Liebermann paintings in an exhibition held in the fall of 1934, he was promptly fired...

...Sorrows are, perhaps, AlFRED WERNER, a leading art critic, has written and lectured widely in the' United States and Europe...

...In his sixties, he cheerfully confessed that his habits were completely bourgeois...

...In his moderation and restraint, which appeared to outsiders like coldness, he reminds us of his younger contemporary, the late Thomas Mann, who, like him, was a scion of a prominent family, was successful in a worldly way, was showered with titles and decorations, was always present at banquets and congresses, yet was always reserved and detached...

...To be sure, the early work of Liebermann—who was born in Berlin in 1847, the scion of a distinguished family of Jewish factory-owners—was "different" only so far as the subject matter was concerned: laborers in fields, shops, and factories...

...the eighty-five-year-old artist was still in full command of his powerful brush...

...But while the subject was new and shocking for those Germans who had not traveled abroad, his conservative detractors overlooked one important point: In technique he was rather traditional, indulging in the bituminous brownish sauces of the Academicians who were trying to give their canvases an "Old Master" look...

...He loved the companionship of his family and the comfort of his home...

...To my great delight, nearly every one of the major museums now owns at least one Liebermann painting and displays it conspicuously on a wall where it can be viewed at best advantage...

...Whether or not the German critics agreed with Emperor Wilhelm II, who labeled Libermann an "anarchist," they were willing to dismiss him as an "Apostle of Ugliness...

...Liebermann's dealer and friend, Paul Cassirer, knew that there was something imperishable in the master's work...

...For he knew himself thoroughly...

...After World War I, Liebermann had to stop his yearly trips to Holland...

...His palette did not grow lighter over the years, but, unlike Monet and his associates, he was not primarily concerned with the way in which iridescent light and atmosphere dissolve forms...

...He was now too frail for travel, and had to turn for inspiration to the resources offered by his summer home on Wannsee, a lake near Berlin...

...You know," he said to her, "if I had died a year ago, I would have been a happy man...

...I am in agreement, and after seeing dozens of Liebermanns in German museums, I believe that much of what he produced in six decades of ceaseless labor has stood the test of time extremely well...

...Instead, his interest centered on the excitement of movement, speed, rhythm...

...The more or less faithful depiction of nature is not the criterion by which to judge perception...

...It is more profound than many of his other portraits—likenesses of statesmen, burgomasters, scientists, generals, and best-selling authors...

...In that same year, the octogenarian artist was visited by a former pupil, a Swiss woman painter...

...I also treasure his drawings—rapid pen sketches, nervously scribbled ink drawings seizing a quick movement, a telling gesture, the magnitude of a wide-open landscape...

...He was also an enthusiastic pamphleteer— his writings and correspondence, if all were published, would fill a shelf...

...Many city and state officials would have followed the coffin, and the mourners would have included representatives of the Prussian Academy of Arts that had been headed by Liebermann, of the press, and, above all, of the artists' associations which were proud of his membership...

...As a person, Liebermann had nothing in common with such tortured souls as Rembrandt and Van Gogh...

...Liebermann survived her husband, but when she learned one day in 1943 that the Gestapo was about to deport her to a concentration camp, she committed suicide...

...Time and again, between 1905 and 1919, he sketched and painted scenes in this ghetto, thrilled by its pictorial wealth—the huddled, dirty walls, the crowds rushing around carts heaped with vegetables, the colors in pell-mell motion...

...Liebermann, a Jew, was quickly ousted from his honorary presidency of the Academy...

...This was not his fate...