LIEBERMANN, MAX
1847 Berlin–1935 Berlin

Title: Bildnis der Tochter Käthe, lesend.
Date: 1901.
Technique: Pastel on flocked, velour-like canvas.
Measurement: 74.5 x 58 cm.
Notation: Signed upper right: M Liebermann.
Frame: Craftsman's frame.



Provenance:
- - Max Liebermann (1901–1923)

- Max Böhm Collection, Beuthen (1928–1931)

- Rudolph Lepke’s Art Auction House, Berlin, auction 28.1.1931, lot 23 (unsold)

- Rudolph Lepke’s Kunst-Auctions-Haus, Berlin, auction 15.11.1931, lot 23 (disposition unknown)

- Galerie Alex Vömel, Düsseldorf (label)

- Emma Poensgen Collection, Heidelberg (acquired 1959)

- Inge Hubert Collection

- Private collection, South Germany (since 2002)


Exhibition:
- 4th Art Exhibition of the Berlin Secession, Drawing and Graphic Arts, 1901/02

- Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin, 1930

- Kunsthalle Bremen, 1954

- Heidelberger Kunstverein, 1979

- National Gallery, Berlin, 1979 (label)

- Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1979

- Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg (permanent loan)


Literature:
- Hancke, Erich: Max Liebermann - sein Leben und seine Werke. Mit Werkkatalog, Berlin 1914, p. 539

- Hancke, Erich: Max Liebermann - sein Leben und seine Werke, MIt Verzeichnis der Werke in öffentlichem Besitz, Berlin 1923, 2nd edition, p. 344

- Friedländer, Max: Max Liebermann, Berlin 1924, p. 106, ill. 54

- Ostwald, Hans: Das Liebermann-Buch, Berlin 1930, p. 261, ill. 128

- Exhib. Cat. Max Böhm Collection, Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin 1930, cat. no. 23

- Exhib. Cat. Max Liebermann, Kunsthalle Bremen, 1954, cat. no. 124

- Exhib. Cat. Max Liebermann in seiner Zeit, Nationalgalerie Berlin/Haus der Kunst, Munich 1979, cat. no. 309



- A tender depiction of domestic harmony and, at the same time, a father’s portrayal of his daughter on the cusp of adulthood

- A particularly large-scale and atmospheric pastel work that masterfully captures the immediacy and fleeting nature of the moment

- Exhibited in the same year it was created at the Fourth Exhibition of the Berlin Secession



The Most Influential Artist in Berlin around 1900

Max Liebermann was 54 years old when he created the present pastel. At this point, he had become the defining figure of Berlin’s art world.

Born into a highly affluent Jewish family of industrialists and merchants, Max Liebermann—educated to the highest standards in Weimar and Paris—made full use of the freedoms available to him and profoundly renewed traditional academic painting in several respects. His turn toward realist subject matter, abandoning the academically prescribed path of historical, biblical, or heroic themes, was regarded as scandalous by conservative circles. Likewise, his increasingly impressionistic and spontaneous painterly manner from the 1880s onward, focused on the representation of light itself, broke with convention. Yet the innovator prevailed.

In 1897, Liebermann was honoured with a major retrospective within the framework of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition. He received the title of professor and, one year later, was appointed a member of the Royal Academy. By 1899, now also highly sought after on the art market, the painter was elected president of the Berlin Secession, which would decisively shape the cultural life of the capital in the years to come. Liebermann’s influence drew other progressive artists, such as Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, to Berlin. In artistic matters, the city had now become a leading force.



Käthe, the Only Child

In 1885, Max and Martha Liebermann became parents to a daughter. Marianne Henriette Käthe Liebermann remained an only child in the large residence at Pariser Platz, where the family had lived since 1892. She was reportedly an avid reader; her father repeatedly depicted her—as he did her mother—absorbed in a book. At the same time, accounts suggest that both Martha and Käthe Liebermann disliked sitting for portraits. What, then, could have been more natural for the artist than to turn the quiet seated presence of “his ladies,” book in hand, into a motif?

At the time the present work was created, Käthe Liebermann was around fifteen years old. She sits slightly turned in a brown armchair positioned frontally toward the viewer. At her feet, a dog sleeps peacefully. It is not one of the family’s three dachshunds known by name, but clearly a larger dog. The pastel is overall kept in dark tones, with only the carpet offering a hint of colour. Yet the girl’s blouse, her face, and the pages of her book are illuminated from the left, presumably by a window outside the composition. Liebermann set particular highlights on the pierced right armrest of the chair as well as between the fingers of Käthe’s left hand.



Pastel as a Medium of Spontaneous Expression

Liebermann came relatively late to the pastel technique (see Günter Busch, The Significance of Pastels in Liebermann’s Oeuvre, in: exhibition catalogue “Nothing Deceives Less Than Appearance”: Max Liebermann, the German Impressionist, Kunsthalle Bremen, 1995/96, pp. 10 ff.). Since the 1880s, he had used the soft and appealing medium to repeat oil compositions on a smaller scale. These more affordable variants by the increasingly celebrated artist found a reliable market in Berlin.

From the late 1880s onward, however, Liebermann also began to exploit the fleeting, immediate, and distinctly graphic quality of pastel—its unique ability to integrate the paper support itself into the composition—for independent works. He created especially portraits of people close to him, as well as fully autonomous works equal in standing to his oil paintings.

It is precisely the sketch-like transience of the technique that corresponds so beautifully with the motif in the present work: the young reader’s right index finger already seems impatient to turn the page, while her eyes remain fixed on the final lines of the text.

The result is both an intimate image of domestic peace and a fatherly characterisation of a serious and deeply concentrated young girl, poised on the threshold of adulthood.

Alexandra Bresges-Jung



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#Max Liebermann #Impressionism #Berlin Secession #Munich Secession #Germany #Modern Art #1900s #Modern Art.







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