MAX LIEBERMANN (GERMAN 1847-1935)
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL (MÄDCHENBILDNIS)
£10,710
Auction: The Gillian Raffles Collection Evening - Lots 1 to 73 - Thursday 01 May at 18:00
Description
signed (lower right), watercolour on paper
Dimensions
23.2cm x 20.5cm (9 1/8in x 8in)
Provenance
Mr J. E. Posnansky;
Waddington Galleries, London;
The Collection of Gillian Raffles.
Footnote
Max Liebermann was a pioneer of German Impressionism. Before the First World War, his infusion of naturalism and modernist sensibility attracted numerous important commissions, and he became the most in-demand portrait artist for Berlin high society. Liebermann was an enthusiastic and well-travelled disciple of modern art and brought the diverse aesthetic ideas he encountered abroad back to Germany. This, however, came to present issues for the artist: in Paris (at the time the art world’s epicentre) his style was deemed ‘not French enough’; the Secessionist Impressionists felt he was too accommodating of the transgressive Expressionists; the Expressionists found him too conservative. Furthermore, as a Jew in early twentieth-century Berlin, he faced and diminishing career opportunities and increasing persecution.
Yet it is Liebermann’s astonishing diversity of reference that makes this exquisite portrait so compelling. The assured and academic draughtsmanship evidences a firm grounding in principles of anatomy and proportion, while the delicate hatching articulating the girl’s features, and the unpainted passages across the girl’s face - which is beautifully unidealized - suggest the glimmers of Impressionism. So, too, does the contrast between sitter’s pale complexion and her vivid red tresses. Charmingly, the artist appears to have signed the work using the same pigment with which he painted the girl’s hair.