A Painter Who Never Found His Own Voice
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The best painting in the Jewish Museum’s Max Liebermann retrospective is the small still life “Table With Pieces of Meat” (1877).
The work, in earthy browns, meaty pinks, blood reds, and fatty whites, is a rather loose yet clear depiction of a small knife and a dozen pieces of mangled flesh scattered across a butcher’s block. The table rises at a sharp diagonal across the rectangle, as if it were a life raft cresting a wave, and its surface, rough and uneven (perhaps Liebermann could not completely hold the plane), suggests not a table so much as a stretch of battleground. Yet the table’s choppy surface, dotted and strung with crimson, only adds to the feeling of carnage and upheaval. Fluid and rich, the painting is a bridge between the solidity of Chardin and the Expressionism of Soutine.
This early canvas is the closest Liebermann (1847-1935) ever came to finding his own voice. In “Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism,” an exhibition of some 50 paintings at the Jewish Museum, it feels like an anomaly – one of a very small number of diamonds in a field of coal.
As the title of the retrospective suggests, Liebermann’s career swung wildly from Dutch and French Realism to Utrillo-esque cityscapes to Degas-like portraits and, finally, to Monet-inspired views of flowering gardens. But most of his paintings, even when they are revolutionary, feel merely like pastiches of other voices – even if those voices came later. The retrospective presents us with a restless and academic artist always on the fringes yet rarely in the fold, an artist actively searching but never quite finding, and an artist ultimately more intriguing biographically than artistically.
Max Liebermann was born into a wealthy Jewish German family in Berlin. His father was a successful, socially responsible businessman who passed on to his son a pro workingclass, anti-nationalist attitude that would eventually bring him notoriety as a “painter of filth” and “apostle of ugliness.” Initially influenced by the Dutch Realists, especially Frans Hals, Liebermann’s education was furthered by his move in 1873 to Paris, where he discovered Courbet, Millet, and the Barbizon painters.
Cosmopolitan and influential, Liebermann became a leader in the artistic and cultural life of the city and was both honored and reviled for his contributions to German liberalism and Modernism. His roller-coaster career was closely tied to German politics and power. In 1896, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor; in 1898 he was elected to the Royal Academy; the same year, he founded the reactionary Berlin Secession (championing artists such as Edvard Munch), a movement that would be superseded by German Expressionism. From 1920 through 1932, he was president of the Prussian Academy of Art.When the Nazis seized power, Liebermann’s paintings were removed from German museums.
Two other paintings at the Jewish Museum equal “Table With Pieces of Meat” for their sense of clarity, directness,and purpose.The allegorical “Winter” (1898), a long horizontal triptych of peasants felling trees in snowy woods,is a cool, silvery, somber mix of bluish blacks and grays. Beautifully orchestrated with overcast light, the friezelike forest opens onto an imposing wall of trees in the distance. Dark verticals alternately set off with the bright,slashing whites, ochers, and reds of the sky, the trees flicker like flames. The stark picture, which suggests prison bars, wounds, and a furnace, is ultimately understated and humble. More Russian than German in feel, it exudes above all else a sense of calm.
Very different in mood is “Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam” (1905), a zigzagging, syrupy mass of faceless figures on a crowded street.”Jewish Quarter,” which prefigures the British painters Kossoff and Auerbach, is thick and slick, a swirling cacophony of heavily loaded brushwork mixed directly on the canvas. As dense as any Liebermann picture, the painting is airy and open and easily traversed.
Other works in the show contain beautiful passages but few totally cohere. When all is said and done, Liebermann remained an academic painter who, as if held between two poles of influence, was never quite German enough to instill his pictures with a sense of cool, northern urgency and never quite French enough to embrace the buoyancy and assuredness of the arabesque. He used white and yellow as stand-ins for light, and his paintings, often dry, constipated, and muddled, generally contain neither the light of the north nor of the south. Despite all his accolades, appointments, and historical importance, Liebermann did not translate his feeling for the world into an emotionally fueled, poetic vision – a crucial leap for an artist.
It is difficult to know exactly how much Liebermann’s politics affected his painting and vice versa. What is evident at the Jewish Museum is that he was never fully able to bring everything – the bourgeois upbringing and the liberal, socialist views; the staleness of the Academy and the freedom of Modernism; the southern lightness of French Impressionism and the northern sturdiness of Dutch Realism – into a unifying oeuvre.
Instead, Liebermann made competent paintings that bring to mind the power and richness of other artists: Velazquez, Hals, Chardin, Courbet, Monet. Walking through the retrospective, rather than focusing on what is present in Liebermann’s art, I was reminded of what is absent.
Until July 30 (1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, 212-423-3232).
