Max Liebermann and International Modernism

Although Max Liebermann (1847–1935) began his career as a realist painter depicting scenes of rural labor, Dutch village life, and the countryside, by the turn of the century, his paintings had evolved into colorful images of bourgeois life and leisure that critics associated with French impressionism. During a time of increasing German nationalism, his paintings and cultural politics sparked numerous aesthetic and political controversies. His eminent career and his reputation intersected with the dramatic and violent events of modern German history from the Empire to the Third Reich. The Nazis’ persecution of modern and Jewish artists led to the obliteration of Liebermann from the narratives of modern art, but this volume contributes to the recent wave of scholarly literature that works to recover his role and his oeuvre from an international perspective.

Marion Deshmukh (1945-2019) was the Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History at George Mason University where she served as Department Chair from 1984 to 1995 and from 2006 to 2007. Her publications include works and exhibition catalog essays on Max Liebermann, on German academies and art unions, on Berlin’s National Gallery of Art since 1945 and on East German painters since 1990. She curated a Max Liebermann graphics show at the Goethe-Institut, Washington, D.C., (Max Liebermann, Works on Paper, 2006) and an exhibit, co-curated with the Wende Museum, also at the Goethe Institut, (Iconoclash! Political Imagery from the Berlin Wall to German Unification, 2009–10).