Liebermann, Max (mäks lē`bərmän'), 1847–1935, German genre painter and etcher. He went to Paris in 1873, where he was impressed by the Barbizon school Barbizon school (bär'bĭzōN`, bär`bĭzŏn'), an informal school of French landscape painting that flourished c.
..... Click the link for more information. of painters. In Holland he was influenced by Frans Hals Frans Hals, c.1618–c.1669, a skillful painter of still life and rustic scenes.

Dirk Hals, c.1591–1656, brother of the elder Frans Hals, imitated his style but lacked his genius.
..... Click the link for more information. and Jozef Israëls Israëls, Jozef (yō`zəf ēs`räĕls), 1824–1911, Dutch genre painter.
..... Click the link for more information. . His early works were realistic, but beginning about 1890 he developed a style closely related to impressionism impressionism, in painting, late-19th-century French school that was generally characterized by the attempt to depict transitory visual impressions, often painted directly from nature, and by the use of pure, broken color to achieve brilliance and luminosity.
..... Click the link for more information. . As leader of the Berlin secession group (1898–1910), he was instrumental in bringing French impressionism to Germany, where younger artists were already moving toward expressionism expressionism, term used to describe works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision. The expressionist transforms nature rather than imitates it.
..... Click the link for more information. . Liebermann depicted the life of the working classes, landscapes, outdoor group studies, and painted more than 200 portraits. A secular Jew and one of his country's most honored artists, he was president of the Prussian Academy of Arts (1920–32) during the Weimar Republic. In his last year, however, he was forbidden to paint by the Nazis and his works were removed from museums and private collections. His painting The Ropewalk in Edam (1904) is in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Bibliography

See B. C. Gilbert, ed., Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism (2005).

Liebermann, Max

(born July 20, 1847, Berlin, Prussia—died Feb. 8, 1935, Berlin, Ger.) German painter and etcher. The realism and simplicity of his first exhibited painting, Women Plucking Geese (1872), were in striking contrast to the Romantic, idealized art then in vogue. In the summer of 1873 he lived in Barbizon, where he became acquainted with the Barbizon school of painters; as a result of their influence, he brightened his palette and helped initiate the German school of Impressionism. In the 1880s he found his subjects in the orphanages and asylums for the old in Amsterdam and among the peasants and urban labourers of Germany and The Netherlands. As a supporter of such academically unpopular styles as Impressionism and Art Nouveau, he founded the Berlin Sezession (1899) but later became president of the conservative Berlin Academy.