A dramatic life; the work, not quite so

Max Liebermann lived a full and long life -- almost long enough to be stripped of all that he had accomplished. He was fortunate (if it’s not too audacious to say so) to have died when he did, at home in Berlin, in 1935. In 1933, when Hitler became German chancellor, Liebermann resigned from his distinguished position as president of the Prussian Academy of Arts before he would have been forced to do so under laws restricting the rights of Jews. Another few years and Liebermann would have watched the rest of what he had worked for get snatched away: his art collection, his home, his reputation, his life.

He lived just long enough to feel the poisoned sting of National Socialist rule in its early stages and to register his disgust. After watching Nazi troops march down the boulevard Unter den Linden shortly after their rise to power, he said, “I could not possibly eat as much as I would like to throw up.”

Liebermann witnessed more than a few monumental events in German history and absorbed equally startling shifts in the world of painting in his 87 years, all from the persistently tenuous position of a German Jew. Would that his paintings matched the dynamism of his time.

The artist’s first American retrospective, at Skirball Cultural Center, reveals Liebermann to be a fine painter but not a brilliant one. He was skilled from the start, picked up much from other artists along the way, and exhibited impressive vitality to the end. Among the show’s 60-plus works are portraits of tremendous insight, garden paintings blooming with verve and sensitive images of men and women at work. Also scattered throughout are stiff and clumsy compositions and scenes muddy, drab or dull.

Nevertheless, “Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism” is a thoughtful and thorough effort, deftly interweaving chapters of Liebermann’s life with corresponding developments in cultural and political history. The show, curated by Skirball senior curator Barbara Gilbert, travels to New York’s Jewish Museum after closing here. Its excellent catalog incisively addresses key societal factors affecting Liebermann’s career and influencing his reception. Two of the most profound: the vexed intersection of German and Jewish identity, and the association, prior to the emergence of native-born Expressionism, of Modernism with undesirable foreignness.

Liebermann was born in 1847 and grew up in a prosperous household, the son of a fabric manufacturer turned banker. His early art training equipped him with the standard set of technical skills as well as a special attachment to the painterly vigor of the Dutch master Frans Hals.

Liebermann maintained a deep connection to Holland after his first sojourn there in 1871. It was there, he said, that he made himself into a painter, seduced by the land and its humble people. Berlin’s burgeoning urbanity registered hardly at all in his work. He favored instead images of a rustic, slower-paced life. Several of the show’s most absorbing paintings originated from sketches he made of Dutch men and women quietly immersed in their tasks: making lace, weaving, sewing. The subjects’ diligent attention to their craft resonates with Liebermann’s own quiet, dignified practice.

An exterior scene is especially eloquent. It shows a group seated under an arched trellis at an old men’s home in Amsterdam. The arbor’s embrace offsets the hollowness of its tunneled passage, echoing poignantly the sense of isolation within communal comfort that comes from such group living.

Liebermann’s respect for ordinary labor got a further boost from exposure to the Barbizon painters Corot and Millet, whose work he came to know during several years in Paris. By 1878 he was back in Germany for good, and well enough established to have incited a minor scandal. His painting of a Semitic-looking boy Jesus conferring with Jewish scholars (represented in the show by a related drawing) sparked debate as high up as the Bavarian parliament. Liebermann-the-accomplished-German-painter suddenly devolved into Liebermann-the-Jew, venturing onto turf where he was explicitly not welcome.

The artist’s palette lightened and his brushwork loosened in the 1890s, after he became enamored of the Impressionist works in a Berlin collection and bought numerous paintings, by Manet, Monet, Degas and others. His subdued scenes of labor gave way to sprightly celebrations of leisure -- images of beer gardens, horse riders and beach-goers. On the occasion of his 50th birthday, Liebermann was given a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin, and the following year he was elected to the academy. At the same juncture, he became a leader of the Secession, an artists group asserting the freedom to exhibit independent of government-controlled organizations.

Though the artists of the Secession did not adhere to a single, unified style, the group, by definition, represented a break from the hero-heavy Classicism favored by the Wilhelmine establishment. Their push for pluralism helped Impressionism find an audience in Germany, but defenders of a nationalist art didn’t take well to foreign-born styles, especially one birthed in France (the object of great bitterness since the Franco-Prussian war) and championed by a Jew. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Liebermann’s patriotism became suspect.

In 1909 he bought property in Wannsee, a wealthy suburb of summer homes on the outskirts of Berlin, and designed a villa with gardens there. From the 1910s until his death, images of the gardens dominated his work. Between his immersion in Impressionism and the early influence of Hals’ fluid brushwork, Liebermann had ample tools to do the flowerbeds justice.

An endearing small painting from 1932 shows the Wannsee studio as a placid, orderly place set in muted tones. Its large window to the garden, however, frames an explosion of color and motion wrested from thick, sensuous strokes. That kind of immediacy and intensity doesn’t animate Liebermann’s work often, but its promise was there from the beginning. In a jarring still life from 1877, “Table With Pieces of Meat,” Liebermann rendered a newly butchered creature in diffuse daubs of crimson, gray and white.

Liebermann showed early promise as a portraitist too, and in his later years he delivered, in work with not just a living subject but a live, animated surface. He painted leading cultural and political figures, family and friends. His rendering of the artist Lovis Corinth is particularly energetic. The sitter’s face is the epicenter of attention, carefully articulated, his shoulders and sleeves merely aftershocks, suggested by sketchy rapid lines.

In his various capacities as a leader in the artistic community, Liebermann spoke out often for the separation of art and politics. He did contribute regularly to a newspaper put out by artists during World War I, but his images of soldiers are simple and sugar-coated, especially compared with graphics made at the time by George Grosz and Otto Dix. And in the Weimar period, when tolerance of political expression was at a high in his lifetime, Liebermann retreated to his Wannsee garden, painting in a style already considered slightly old-fashioned. Ultimately, there was no avoiding questions of ideology, religion and race. All three had become highly politicized. Politics, in the end, came to him.

In his last known work, a lithograph (circa 1935), Liebermann pays homage to the mothers of the 12,000 German Jews who died fighting in the first world war. His attempt to remind the public of Jewish fidelity to the German empire was, of course, too little, too late. By that time, Liebermann’s works had been pulled from view at museums and confiscated from private collections.

On his 80th birthday, in 1927, he had been celebrated with a large exhibition, declared an honorary citizen of Berlin and hailed in a cover story in Berlin’s leading illustrated magazine. One moment he was a giant on the German cultural scene, and the next deemed subhuman, just another “degenerate” artist, enemy of the Reich, member of a “race” targeted for extermination. Plans for that so-called Final Solution were adopted in Wannsee in 1942. The Liebermann villa was confiscated by the Nazis and used to house guests for the occasion. Even at his best, Liebermann could hardly produce a work of art as breathtaking in its irony and injustice as the story of his life.

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‘Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism’

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; noon to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Jan. 29, 2006

Price: $8; students/seniors, $6

Contact: (310) 440-4500, www.skirball.org