ArtistGermanb.1847–d.1935
Max Liebermann
1 active items
Max Liebermann was born in Berlin on 20 July 1847, the son of a prosperous Jewish textile manufacturer. He began studying law and philosophy at the University of Berlin before turning entirely to painting, enrolling at the Weimar Art School in 1868 after early lessons under Carl Steffeck. Time spent studying in Munich and extended stays in Paris and the Netherlands in the 1870s and 1880s brought him close to the plain-air realism of Barbizon painters and to Dutch genre traditions - influences that shaped the directness of his early work.
His debut painting "Women Plucking Geese" (1872) was met with criticism in Germany for its unsentimental realism, a reaction that would follow him for years. After settling permanently in Berlin in 1884, his style shifted as he absorbed the techniques of French Impressionism, particularly through the work of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Light and atmosphere grew more central to his painting, though he retained a German attachment to legible subject matter - workers, bathers, children in schools, and later the comfortable bourgeois world of Berlin's educated classes.
In 1899 Liebermann co-founded the Berlin Secession, a formation that challenged the academic conservatism dominating official German art, and served as its president until 1911. By 1897 he had been appointed professor at the Berlin Academy, and in 1920 he became its president - a position from which the Nazis forced him to resign in 1932. When the academy voted to stop exhibiting works by Jewish artists in 1933, he resigned rather than wait to be expelled, writing the much-quoted remark that he could not eat as much as he wished to vomit.
From around 1910, the garden at his villa on the Wannsee became the central motif of his late work. Over 200 paintings and pastels documented the garden's changing seasons and shifting light, producing one of the most sustained engagements with a single domestic landscape in German art history. His portrait commissions included Albert Einstein and Paul von Hindenburg. Liebermann died on 8 February 1935; the Gestapo banned attendance at his funeral, fearing it would become a public demonstration. His wife Martha remained in Berlin under increasingly severe persecution and took her own life in 1943 to avoid deportation.
On the auction market, Liebermann commands significant prices internationally - his record stands at over 3.7 million USD at Sotheby's London. In the Auctionist database, 14 works are recorded across German-speaking and Nordic auction houses including Koller Auktionen, im Kinsky, Van Ham, Stockholms Auktionsverk Hamburg, and Grisebach. Works span paintings, drawings, and works on paper. Top results in our data include a 1931 avenue painting at 131,250 CHF and two studies related to his Dutch village school subjects, each selling above 10,000 CHF. One work remains active at auction as of early 2026.