Patrick Bade
From Realism to Impressionism

Patrick Bade - Menzel, Liebermann and Corinth: From Realism to Impressionism

- I’m going to be talking today about three very remarkable German artists of the Early Modern Period, Adolph von Menzel on the left, Max Liebermann in the middle, and Lovis Corinth on the right. They deserve to be far better known than they are outside of German speaking countries. Particularly, I would say, in Britain, where, when I was a student at the Courtauld, the attitude was, as far as the Early Modern Period was concerned, if it didn’t happen in Paris, it didn’t count, and I think this is very unjust. And the other slight problem is that all three tend to be judged in terms of what went on in Paris. So, if you look them up, or if you Google them, you’ll find Menzel described as a Realist, and Liebermann and Corinth described as Impressionists. But that is, if you’re thinking in French terms, that is actually somewhat misleading because Menzel is not like Courbet, for instance, and Liebermann and Corinth are not like Monet. They’re doing something very different. Well, the oldest of the three artists is Adolph von Menzel. This is a little sketch that he made of himself. A very questioning glance as he looks in the mirror. And this is what he looked like as a young man and as an old man. He was born into a very humble background. His father ran a lithography workshop and that’s really where he got most of his training. He had very little formal academic training as an artist. He’s largely a self-taught artist. As you can see, he was a rather strange looking man. He was tiny. He was 4'6". He got his first big break as an artist in 1839, still a very young man, as an illustrator.

And he was commissioned to provide 400 illustrations for a massive Life of Frederick the Great, and he produced 400 woodcuts. And these actually proved very fertile for him, and the designs he produced for the woodcut illustrations became the basis of many of his most famous paintings. I suppose the most famous of all is the one you see on the right-hand side, which was painted in 1850, and it shows Frederick the Great playing the flute in his palace of Sanssouci at Potsdam. So, what made him famous were big, elaborate history paintings, but history paintings as the 19th century would’ve understood the term, not as the Renaissance or the Baroque would’ve understood it. History painting in the 18th century meant large scale, monumental paintings of universal themes, mythological themes or whatever, or themes from ancient history with lots of figures that were either nude or classically draped. Once you moved into the 19th century, history painting becomes, you could better characterise it, really, as historical genre painting. That’s scenes from the life of the past. So, and there’s a lot of this going on. It’s happening in France, it’s happening in England, it’s happening all over the Western world. And certainly, Menzel’s among the most accomplished of this type of painting. And you can see that he’s put an enormous amount of effort into getting things right, getting the costume right, getting the furniture right, and so on, getting the lighting right. Here is his studio in Berlin. He’s Berlin-based throughout his life. Travels very little apart from a couple of important visits to Paris in the 1860s. So, you can see him sitting in a chair in front of one of these enormous paintings.

He would certainly have needed a ladder to climb up to the top of the canvas. Here is another of these works. Very spectacular. Technically, quite extraordinary. So, he’s not only, he was certainly a very local patriotic person, Prussian, devoted to the Prussian monarchy, the history of the monarchy. And he becomes, in a way, the official artist of Wilhelmine Germany, Wilhelm I and then later, Wilhelm II. And so, he’s also recording court life. This shows a supper at a ball in the Hohenzollern Palace in Berlin. And, as in the later part of his career, of course, Germany is united, and he becomes the great chronicler of what the Germans called, “the site” and I’m sure William has talked a lot about this. This incredible economic boom of Germany, industrial boom of Germany after 1870, when, greatly to the alarm of the British, of course, who’d been the leading industrial nation in the world. By the end of the 19th century, German industrial production had actually overtaken British industrial production. And this shows you an iron rolling mill. Again, it’s a great sort of epic picture, multi-figured, and a very brilliant virtuoso performance. So, this is what he was really known for, and famous for in his lifetime. But in the 20th century, another side, a private side, of Menzel was revealed. And I think today, that’s the side of his art that really fascinates people. This, I suppose, has become his most famous picture, painted in 1847. It’s in the Lenbachhaus. No, it’s in the Neue Pinakothek, in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. So, I do hope that those of you who are coming with me to Munich later this year, that we’ll be able to see it. It’s quite a small picture, and an astonishing work for the 1840s. In many ways, it looks forward to Degas and the Impressionists. It shows his sister. He was very, very devoted to his sister and he painted some of his loveliest works inspired by her. So, 1840s. There is gas lighting, but it wouldn’t be in most people’s homes.

You can see these are oil lamps. And what is very remarkable about this picture, I think, is the informality of the composition. That it looks, it’s asymmetrical. It looks like it’s, it looks really like a snapshot. But remember that photography has been invented. It’s around in the 1840s. You haven’t really got cameras that can take an image fast enough to get a snapshot. So, this is really ahead of its time, and it’s just capturing a little moment and capturing a light effect. This is another painting, a sketch of his beloved sister. This drawing I know very, very well. I lived with this drawing for a year when I lived in Munich. 18… no, not 18. 19. I’m not that old. 1973 to 1974, for a large part of that year, I was staying in the house of a very wealthy art collector called Wolfgang. He was probably Germany’s leading art collector at that time. And this was, he loved this. In all his collection, I think this was the image that he most loved. It’s now- He died prematurely, sadly, and his entire collection was acquired by the National Gallery in Washington. So, if you want to see this now, you have to go to Washington. So, these quite small scale, very freely painted, very spontaneous sketches of everyday life that, as I said, in many ways, that- Not the palette of colours. The colour palette of colours is of course more limited than an Impressionist painting would be in the 1870s. But this is the sort of subject that an Impressionist artist might have painted. This, again, has the same freedom, same spontaneity, and it shows a hotel room, very new, very banal. I suppose the furnishing of the room, the most new, the most sort of current feature, of course, would be the cheval glass. That would’ve been a new thing. It was only around this time, in the middle of the 19th century, that it would’ve been possible to manufacture great sheets of mirror glass like this and that Bourgeois homes had them.

Previously, of course, large scale glass was confined to great palaces like Versailles. But such a, you know, it’s, I think he’s one of those artists for me, Pissarro also has this quality to some extent, who confined poetry in the most banal and everyday images. So, he… He’s born in 1815, I hope I mentioned that. So, he’s a young man. Well, he’s a boy, actually, when railways are invented and through much of the first half of his life, the railway system is being constructed throughout Europe. And I, in many lectures, I’ve made the comparison between railways and the internet. They both, these are two things that in their periods completely transformed the world. And Menzel is very interested in the modern world. He’s very interested in what goes on around him. He’s certainly interested in railways. And this is, of course, when you got railways connecting cities, they completely transform the economy of the western world. They shrink the world. You can get from one place to another much more quickly. And all sorts of things come out of railways, like railway hotels. So, he’s staying in a railway hotel that overlooks a railway station in Berlin. And this is what he’s painted the moon like. You can sort of associate that with Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism. Of course this is a very, very unromantic theme, a rather scruffy railway station. This very famous picture dates from 1847, and this is the newly constructed railway that connected Berlin with Potsdam. So, this can compete with Turner, of course. Turner, “Rain, Steam, and Speed”, which is 1844. So, it’s just three years earlier. And it’s always said to be the first painting by great artists of the railway age. But, and it’s a wonderful picture. Thrilled Monet and Pissarro when they saw it, when they came to London in 1870. But this is a Romantic’s view of a railway, the Turner on the right hand side.

This is a Realist’s, with a capital “R”, view. The banality, the banal reality, actually, of railway travel in the 1840s. Rather, some rather dramatic, romanticised image that we get from Turner. So, I think he must have travelled a lot on the trains and everywhere he went, he took his sketchbooks with him. And you can see he’s making little rapid sketches of what he sees inside a railway carriage. And on the right hand side, we have a drawing, rather, an elaborated drawing, where he’s caught somebody lounging in the corner of a railway carriage and yawning. So, not a very pretty image. And he, another way in which he anticipates the Impressionists, and where he also has his finger on the pulse of modernity is in being inspired by suburban development. This is, of course, another thing that comes out of the railways. This rapid, massive, expansion of cities, like Berlin and Paris and London. And one reason they could expand was that people could travel in and out to work on suburban railway systems. And this led to every city in the western world has its scruffy, unbeautiful, unloved suburbs. But like Pissarro and Sisley and Monet, he finds this fascinating, this is a new thing. And so, this is a view presumably from his apartment in Berlin ‘cause he paints this view of this chaotic suburban, or urban, development several times in different seasons. We can see here the trees are in full leaf. So, this must be in the middle of the year. And here is the same view. Again, anticipating Monet by decades, the Monet painting, the “Haystacks”, and in different seasons and so on. So, what was his relationship with French art and how much did he know about them and how much did they know about him? Well, he certainly made two important visits to Paris, one in the 1850s and one… In 1867, there was a Paris World exhibition.

Probably, both times when he went to Paris, I suppose, it was that he was attracted by the world exhibitions and there would have been a huge range of cultural things for him to learn and experience. And this is a painting he made on his 1867 visit to Paris. And it shows a fashionable crowd in the Tuileries Gardens, where there was a band that would paint music and they’re chatting and half-heartedly listening to the music. Well, this of course is a subject that had been painted four years earlier by Manet. Very famous picture by Manet, “Music in the Tuileries Gardens”, that dates from 1862. It’s shared between the National Galleries in London and Dublin. And it’s a kind of a manifesto picture. It’s really expressing the ideas of Baudelaire’s famous essay, “The Painter of Modern Life”, even though, actually, Baudelaire didn’t publish it, that essay, 'till the following year, 1863. But Baudelaire and Manet were very close and Manet was certainly very aware of Baudelaire’s ideas. And in that essay, “The Painter of Modern Life”, Baudelaire had said to modern artists, “Stop painting ancient Rome, stop painting the Middle Ages, stop painting the 18th century. Paint what you see around you. Find the poetry and the beauty in modern life and bourgeois men in their top hats and their Peyton leather shoes and the women in their extraordinary crinolines and the hustle bustle and the beauty of the modern city.” So, this is really the first painting by Manet, the first painting by a major French artist to put those ideas into practise. And I think it’s pretty obvious that Liebermann knew all about this. I mean, just to me, there is an echo there, I don’t know whether you agree with me, that the man in the top hat, sort of bending forward in front of a tree, it’s a little bit too similar to be entirely coincidental. And here is… this is certainly a picture.

Well, both these pictures, actually, are painted in the studio. So, neither are, strictly speaking, Impressionist pictures, which should be painted on the spot before the motif. But here is one of the sketches that Menzel made on the spot on which his painting was based. But this is a picture from his- I think this is earlier. I think this is 1856, and from an earlier visit to Paris and it shows a Parisian theatre, the Theatre du Gymnase, and this was a picture that was known to Degas. So, I think that there’s influence going in both directions, that Menzel is certainly picking up on modern French painting, but Degas was hugely admiring of Menzel, on one occasion, declared that he was “the greatest living artist”. And I feel pretty sure he must have seen this picture. 'Cause in so many feature of its features, it directly anticipates Degas’ paintings of the theatre and the opera house, what with the break with any theatrical paintings of earlier periods, which, normally, you’d be given a view, full on frontal, of the stage. You would not be shown the orchestra pit, you would certainly not be shown the footlights, and the artist would try and give you the illusion that the play is trying to give you. So, both Degas and Menzel deconstruct that illusion. Instead, they’re showing you what it is actually like to be in the theatre with the relatively dim auditorium, with the little gas flames all the way along the front of the stage, highly, highly dangerous for both the performers and the audience. Any number of disastrous, horrible, theatre fires with multiple deaths in the 19th century. So, we’re very aware of the artifice of the illusion that we’re being presented with. So, here are sketches that, for that painting, were presumably made on the spot in the theatre. But once again, the painting, you couldn’t, you can’t paint an oil painting in the theatre during a performance.

That would be impossible. So, here is a Degas of a few years later, one of the first of his theatre scenes, where you see all the features I’ve just described, really. The contrast between the audience, you can see the instruments popping up out of the orchestra pit. I mentioned in a Wagner lecture recently, as far as opera was concerned, the opera house was concerned, Wagner was the first person to lower the pit so you actually can’t see any, or the audience couldn’t see any of the instruments. But in both cases here, you’ve got the tops of the double basses and tops of the bassoons, the tall instruments, intruding and silhouetted against the footlights. So many- He’s such a wonderful draughtsman and his ability to capture a momentary event or vision. This, of course, is very poignant indeed, this drawing, ‘cause it captures a live concert with Clara Schumann playing the piano. You can look at the way she’s deeply concentrated on the music that she’s reading and the great Hungarian Jewish violinist Joachim, Joseph Joachim, on the left. And that’s, so, that’s quite an elaborate drawing. But this, I think, is probably- Sitting in the audience, he would’ve made sketches like this and the more elaborate drawing would be made from them. He’s got such an original view of the world. Sorry about my jittering image, but you’ll be happy to know that I’ve just paid for a very expensive new computer that will be delivered next week. So, I hope that my terrible tech problems will be a thing of the past. Yes, this is… He’s got such a quirky, original way of looking at the world. So, here we are in the zoo in Berlin, but we’re getting the zoo from the animal’s point of view, looking at the people behind the bars, outside the animal enclosure. This belongs to a very remarkable, terrifying group of drawings. If you look at this, of course we, we’ve seen photographic images that look like this of heaped bodies. It’s, I think it’s very difficult for us to look at these pictures, but without thinking of images of the discovery of the concentration camps at the end of the second World war. 'Cause he could know, he knew nothing about those.

These drawings all date from 1866. And they, he went to the front in the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866. And he showed these abandoned or heaped bodies of people killed in the battles of that war. But I think what is so remarkable about him, it makes him a very special kind of Realist, is that there is nothing sacred. There is no subject that is unworthy of his attention. Even if it’s his own rather unlovely foot. And this is his unmade bed. I mean, decades, well, a century or so, before Tracy Emin had this idea of exhibiting her unmade bed. It’s very, it’s a wonderful drawing. I find it a very moving drawing. It’s very expressive somehow 'cause the plume or whatever it is, the sheets, that they’re formed by the artist having, shaped by the artist having slept in them, being in them. So, he’s somehow, even though he’s absent from this, he’s also present. It’s somehow a self-portrait. As I said, nothing, nothing is sacred for him. He, everything is in his interest. I don’t know how he managed to spy on this man dumping in a lavatory and got that down quickly in his notebook or this man getting his penis out to pee in a urinal. I mean, this is a, actually, this is a sight that everybody would’ve been familiar with in the 19th century. I can remember when I went to Paris the first time in 1963, all over Paris, there were these, you’d see this 'cause there were public urinals. I was a bit shocked as a 12 year old. But so, I think, here again, there’s a rather interesting parallel with Degas. Degas, his famous keyhole nudes, which were so revolutionary and so shocking in the 19th century, which, there’s a sort of voyeuristic aspect in them, with the artist apparently looking through the keyhole at women about their ablutions washing themselves.

So, it was a friend of his, a photographer, an Italian photographer, who snapped Degas coming out of a urinal in the street in Paris and still busily doing up his fly buttons as he comes out. Degas, at least, he did actually have the enough humour to find this quite funny and ironic of somebody spying on him in a very private moment. As I said, nothing is too humble, too ordinary, to be uninteresting to him. Here is a mop in a bucket. These sketchbooks are so wonderful. How about this? This surely is one of the most extraordinary drawings in the Western tradition. A comb with the hair in it. Who, what artist ever before Menzel, or even after, actually, come to think of it, would have thought that this was a subject for a drawing? And mosquitoes. As I said, nothing is too humble. So, we move on to Max Liebermann, who, like Mendelssohn and like Mayaber, those three great artists in their fields, who, all three of them came from very wealthy Jewish Berlin banking families, which of course gave them an advantage in life and also caused a fair bit of resentment by rival artists who didn’t have those kind of advantages. It’s… the Jewish contribution to western culture that came about through assimilation in the 19th century is a very extraordinary phenomenon. And of course, Trudy’s discussed it, and I’ve discussed it in many, many different lectures. But the Jewish contribution to the visual arts is probably less important, at least creatively, than the Jewish contribution to literature, to philosophy, to music, of course, very much. And in as far as there is a very, very important Jewish contribution to the early development of modern art, it’s largely through galleries and through critics and through collectors rather than through artists. So, and certainly until the end of the 19th century, it’s different when you get into the 20th century, early 20th century. Suddenly, you have an enormous number of wonderful Jewish artists, Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, so on and so on and so on.

But really, there are only two very important Jewish painters in the 19th century. There is Max Liebermann in Germany and there’s Camille Pissarro in France. And there are very, very interesting parallels between them in that their importance, they’re both very good artists. I mean, this is a fantastic piece of painting. You can tell that he studied Rembrandt, can’t you, from the way the paint is applied. And he’s learned a lot from Rembrandt. And excellent that he is as a painter, and excellent as Pissarro is as a painter, in a way, their importance is different in that both were very important nurturing father figures, mentors to younger artists. So, both played a very important role in the development of modern art in their respective countries. This is where Max Liebermann lived. He inherited- I’m actually not sure which one of these two buildings on the left or the right was his family palace. This is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. And so he lived in a very grand palace overlooking the Brandenburg Gate. And he was one of those people, I suppose Klimt was a bit like that in Vienna, who had a kind of natural authority. And so it was, he was the obvious person, really, to be elected President of the Berlin Secession when that was set up in the 1890s. And that’s a position he held for many years. And here he is with other artists belonging to the Berlin Secession. This is his studio in Berlin. And you capture a glimpse of him in a mirror, painting away. This was a very controversial picture quite early in his career. This is 1879. And he, incidentally, and he always remained Jewish. He never converted to Christianity. But this is, of course, a subject from the Christian Bible, from the New Testament, and it’s Christ debating in the temple.

So, when this picture was first exhibited, it was very, very controversial indeed because it was really felt by lots of people to be chutzpah or even shocking that a Jewish artist would dare to paint a Christian subject, would dare to paint Jesus like this. But he brings, he’s bringing the aesthetic of a Realist. He’s re- although I suppose that the synagogue that this is taking place in, I don’t suppose the, you know, those baroque balustrade on the staircase, that’s hardly archaeologically correct, but he’s showing the interior of a synagogue. It’s a real synagogue, isn’t it? And the elders who are debating with Christ are clearly based on Jewish models. He was very attracted by Dutch art and the Dutch Golden Age. And the Dutch Golden Age is, of course, such a byword, in a way, for a very open, humane, and liberal society in the 17th century. And there were all these arms houses and orphanages and old people’s homes that were created. So, it was very, way ahead of its time, Holland, in the 17th century, in the humane way that the less fortunate people in society were treated. And I think it was probably also appealing to Liebermann that it was the place in the 17th century where Jews were most welcome and most well treated. So, he travels a lot in Holland and he likes painting these arms houses and orphanages and so on. Here’s another. Now, here you’ll see this effect, which was so celebrated by the Impressionists, of sunlight breaking through the leaves of a tree in leaf, in little patches on the ground and on the wall and all the figures. The Impressionists, around about 1870, Monet, Renoir, are the first people to aim to paint this. So you can, this is clearly a picture which is probably entirely painted out of doors or certainly, very largely painted out of doors and directly observing out of door light effects and atmosphere. And in that way, it’s Impressionist. But he was wealthy enough to collect modern French paintings. So, he owned paintings by Manet and Monet and all these artists. But he was quite sceptical about Monet’s use of colour and, you know, all the multicoloured shadows and so on.

He uses, I would say, a much more restrained and limited palette than the Impressionists do. This is probably about as close as he gets to Impressionism, but I think he’s really more influenced by Manet, the older Manet, who’s not really strictly an Impressionist, than he is by the younger Monet. Amongst the finest of his paintings, like von Menzel, he was very attracted to zoos. And in Berlin and in Amsterdam, in the zoos, they had parrot walks, where the parrots were chained to stands and people could walk past them. And he did a series of paintings in Amsterdam and in Berlin of the parrot walks. And these, I suppose, are his most frequently illustrated, most widely admired paintings. A great many self-portraits. Actually, well, self-portraits, you could say, there’s a real German tradition of self-portraits mentioned in previous lectures. Durer, who painted the first fully independent self-portraits. In other words, not just that the artist’s visible in the background of a religious scene. The whole painting being a self-portrait. Durer painted a great many self-portraits. I think you could do a fantastic exhibition, really, of German self-portraits through the ages. There are so many interesting German self-portraits. Many, many. You could have a whole show of self-portraits by each one of the artists I’m talking about this evening. So, here is Liebermann turning around to look at himself in the mirror as he paints his self portrait. And on the right is his wife, Martha.

Very long, happy, successful marriage. So, he was a hugely respected and loved figure, really, in the German art world. His wealth enabled him to buy a very beautiful villa outside of Berlin, ironically, on the shores of the Wannsee. So, his villa neighbored the notorious Wannsee Villa, where the “Final Solution” was devised. And he, like Monet, he created very beautiful gardens on the shores of the Wannsee. And a lot of his best later pictures in the 1920s were of his own gardens in the Wannsee, as you see on the right hand side. Here, as a very old man. He lived into his eighties, he died in 1935, and he, of course, lived long enough to see the rise of the Nazis. Here he is as a very old man with his wife. So, he had a grandstand view of the arrival of the Nazis in Berlin. And he famously said, , which means, “I can’t eat enough to vomit as much as I want to.” That was his reaction to the arrival of the Nazis. But he- This is his funeral with his widow in 1935. They were still able to, I don’t know if “celebrate” is the right word for that, but have a funeral. And there was a memorial exhibition, and this is his widow. And this, I find this almost unbearable. She survived until 1943. And in 1943, she received notice that she was about to be deported to the East. By this time, 1943, people knew what that meant. And this is the last note that she ever wrote. And she’s writing to a friend and it starts, it’s difficult to read, this German script, but you can make out she’s saying, “I’m completely confused.” You can imagine this woman in her late eighties who, completely helpless. What’s she going to do? And in fact, as they came to get her, she committed suicide. Now I move on to my last artist. This is Lovis Corinth and this is again, a self-portrait. And this, it’s a self-portrait in his studio in Munich. You can see Munich in the background. This painting, I love this painting. It’s just so amazing, really. He paints many self-portraits. Actually, he painted at least one self-portrait every year through his life. And they’re very, often, they’re very humorous.

I think this has a humorous, I mean he’s depicting himself, in a way, as the ugly German, overfed on beer and wurst and so on. I think he’s gently mocking himself and he’s also parodying a painting which was very- Oh no, I’ll come to it. There was a painting, very, very famous at the time by the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin, who was called “Switzerland’s Michelangelo”. He was thought to be a great genius until Julius M, in 1905, he wrote an article entitled “Defile Bocklin”, echoing Nietzsche’s famous essay in which Nietzsche tried to take apart Wagner’s reputation. The Nietzsche wasn’t really very successful, but Julius M was all too successful, really, in pointing out the pretentiousness and the silliness of some of the art of the Bocklin. So. But I think this painting by Corinth is actually doing the same. Two other very extraordinary self-portraits by Lovis Corinth, one on the left with his young, much younger, wife, which some people might think is rather indecent, the way he’s clutching her breast. And another rather unflattering, unlovely self-portrait of himself on the right hand side. The portrait of Corinth with his wife, Charlotte, is again, it’s a parody, of course. It’s a homage and it’s a parody of the very famous self-portrait of Rembrandt with his wife, Saskia, on his knee, and raising a glass to toast the viewer. Here is- What a loving, lovely portrait of his wife, Charlotte. She, he, they met in 1902. He was living in Berlin at the time and he set up a school, an art school, for women. Of course, that was a daring thing to do. She came from a very liberal Berlin Jewish family. They may have regretted it when they sent her to, allowed her, to go to art school, 'cause she quickly fell in love with her teacher. And they married.

Actually, a very happy marriage. And they had two children. Here they are with the two children. She… So, he died in 1925. She didn’t die until the 1960s. She was much younger and of course she lived to a great age. She fled Germany in 1933 and escaped to America, where she spent the rest of her life. Now in 1880, he came from also from a very humble background, contrasting with Liebermann, but more like Menzel. His father was a tanner, but he was obviously very naturally gifted, with an extraordinary facility. And he trained initially in Munich between 1880 and 1884. And then from 1884 to 1888, he went to Paris and he attended the Academie Julian and his teacher was the French academic artist, Bouguereau, who you can see on the right hand side. So, there’s a kind of slickness, smooth surface, which is very different from anything that Corinth wanted to do at any stage of his career. But I have to say, I think, in some of these big mythological, sexy, mythological pictures, there is a kind of vulgarity and a crassness that does indeed remind me of Bouguereau. So, what, I think what he took from Bouguereau is actually a rather unsympathetic side of his art. But he was open to different things. So, when he was in Paris, as I said, he was being taught by Bouguereau, but he was certainly looking at more- Oh, here’s another Bouguereau-esque, rather grotesque, academic erotic picture. Pretty ghastly actually. But at the same time, he’s looking around at more recent French painting. Now, before I tell you, you decide.

Which one of these is by Manet and which one is by Lovis Corinth? The luminosity, the technique, the palette, the brushwork. There’re so close. He’s really, really learning from Manet. Well, it’s Corinth on the left hand side and Manet on the right hand side. But he’s also looking at the Old Masters and of course, in Paris, he can go to the Louvre. And a painting in the Louvre that was pretty well a talisman for Realist artists in the 19th and into the 20th century was Rembrandt’s extraordinary “Flayed Ox”, a fascinating, a moving painting. What can you say? It’s a painting about mortality, about death and fragility. It’s a very, very powerful, extraordinary painting. It’s a repulsive subject, but beautiful. I think that, you know, it makes me think of Delacroix, saying that a true, that he said that the severed heads that were painted by Gericault are his definition of the true meaning of beauty. That means don’t mistake prettiness for beauty. Beauty is something else entirely. But that, this “Flayed Ox” of Rembrandt inspired a whole series of paintings of butchers shops by Lovis Corinth. And the same Rembrandt, of course, was a major inspiration for Soutine later on in the 20th century. Here is Lovis Corinth on the left-hand side and Soutine on the right hand side. Well, he’s quite a successful portraitist, but in a way, for a while, in the first years of the 20th century, you could say he’s a Teutonic version of Sargent, but much tougher than Sargent. There’s an element of grotesque caricature in his work. Here are two aristocratic portraits, one on the right hand side, which I hope to able to see with some of you in Munich. It’s Eduard von Keyserling, it’s in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. I’ve known German aristocrats who look like this. You get to look like this, I think through generations of inbreeding, watery eyes, weak chin, not a well person.

But oh, I think they’re both terrific portraits. But who would pay money to be painted like this? These are, they’re quite cruel, really, I think, in their depictions of the subjects. Now, 1911, he suffered a very serious stroke. And he, the rest of his life, the 14 years remaining of his life, he was paralysed on the left hand side. Luckily, he could still use his right hand, but both hands were afflicted with a very severe tremor. And his style changes very radically. He was helped to continue his career by the support of his wife, Charlotte. But we can see, whereas before 1911, his work was a kind of Impressionism. And after 1911 and having the stroke, his work changes and moves. I think there was a, it might have happened anyway, but the stroke and the results, the effects of it, certainly accelerated this change towards a style that is more close to Expressionism with very free, bold application of paint, a strong element of exaggeration and distortion. This is actually a self-portrait that he made the year after his stroke. I think it, in a way, it’s blind Sampson. I think he’s identifying with Sampson, this terrible affliction that he had with the stroke. Luckily, it didn’t affect his eyes. And many people today much prefer his post-stroke work to his pre-stroke work. Wonderful landscapes on the Walchensee. This is, obviously, a New Testament subject, Christ before Pilate, the mocking of Christ. And I show you this because this painting was a star exhibit in the notorious “Entartete Kunst” show, set up by the Nazis in Munich in 1937 to denounce all forms of modern art.

And so Hitler and the Nazis wanted to prove that Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, all these modern “isms” were degenerate and they really honed in on the fact that many of the artists were Jewish and many of the people who collected the art were Jews. But Corinth was central to their ideas because he had painted more or less naturalistically before his stroke. And he painted in an Expressionist, distorted way after his stroke. So, their argument, he was their prime argument. He’s been dead of course for several years, but he became, in a way, a negative poster boy for the Nazi art theory in the 1930s. And these are my two final paintings. This very late, post-stroke, self-portrait by Lovis Corinth on the left hand side, brilliantly painted, actually. And on the right hand side, another artist who was categorised as degenerate by the Nazis. This is, of course, Oscar Kokoschka. And this painting was his reply. And he mockingly, ironically titled it, “Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist”. Well, Corinth had been, in the last part of his career, very famous, a very establishment figure, and all the great German museums had bought his work. But when the Nazis came to power, they confiscated 295 works by Lovis Corinth from public collections. Some were sold off, as they thought they could get money for them, often through Switzerland. Quite a lot were destroyed. The same is true of the work of Kokoschka. And all three of the artists that I’ve talked about tonight were much loved by Jewish collectors. So, again, their work was seized, as you know. All the Jewish art collections were dissolved. Their works were, or they were forced to sell them for a minimal price. All the works were seized. I was actually interested, I had a very interesting email today from a lady whose family had a major art collection with works of Liebermann and Corinth and they’re still struggling to find them and get them back. So, that’s still very much an ongoing process. So, let’s see what you have to say.

Q&A and Comments:

I think it’s quite likely, or I think his father was actually a lithographer, but I mean, everybody, he was aware of photography. It’s quite likely that most artists were using photographs to help them with their big pictures in the 19th century. It was not something they always admitted to. It was sometimes thought to be a rather shameful thing. But even if they’re not actually based on photos, once the world had seen what the, once people had seen what the world looks like through the lens of a camera, it changed the way artists depicted the world.

So, there’s definitely a photographic element in his work. Menzel- “Young Christ with the Elders” in Frankfurt. I don’t know that picture.

You’re not thinking, you are surely not thinking of the Liebermann picture, which I think is in Frankfurt. I think you might be confusing Menzel and Liebermann here. And if it’s Liebermann, it’s definitely not antisemitic.

“Liebermann’s adversarial relationship with the Kaiser.” Yes, of course the Kaiser did, the Kaiser loved Menzel. And of course the Kaiser was very, like Hitler, was very reactionary in his artistic taste. Absolutely hated Kathe Kollwitz. That’s something I’m going to be talking about, I think, in my next lecture.

Q: “What happened to Liebermann’s art collection?”

A: That I don’t know and I should have prepared myself. I knew somebody was going to say, “Did he have any children?” And I don’t know, I can’t give you the answer. I’ll have to look up those things. Thank you, Sally.

This is Margaret who likes Menzel the best. I think Menzel is maybe the most original of the three, but they’re all wonderful. And I think Corinth is a very mixed artist. He can be absolutely terrific and really crass.

Thank you, Katrine. Yes. Well, 'cause Corinth was how much? Yes. He’s a bit older, isn’t he? He’s older than Schiele and Kokoschka. So, you could see him as breaking the ground for them.

And the, let me have a look on, I’ve got, it should be on my list. I’ve made a list of all the main paintings and on it there, I’ve said where they are. So, I’m going to have a look.

The where is the, oh, it doesn’t seem to be on the list. Oh yes. It’s in the Berlin National Gallery. And that’s, the largest collection of Menzel paintings is actually in the Berlin National Gallery. And probably the very classical drawing you saw by Corinth will be from early on in his career, perhaps in his student years.

Thank you, Lou. “New exhibition at the National Gallery.” I haven’t seen it yet, although I was at the National Gallery with a group just two days ago.

Impressionism. It’s had good reviews, so I’m sure it’s worth going to if you happen to be in England. Thank you, Dina and Barbara.

“Definitely.” This is Yana saying, “It’s definitely not Liebermann.” I’ll check that one out. It would be, it’s always awful, isn’t it, when you really admire somebody and you find that they were antisemitic? It’s a problem for me with Degas, who’s an artist I absolutely love and worship and said some very horrible things.

Thank you, Thomas. And thank you, Ruth.

“Looks like Prometheus.” Yes, I think that’s very likely. He’s, you know, there are lots and lots of classical references in his work.

Q: “Was not Liebermann the doyen of the first Impressionists?”

A: No. Liebermann is younger than the Impressionists. So, if there’s any influence, it’s from the Impressionists to Liebermann, not the other way around.

Good. Ben Uri will tell you about Liebermann. Yes, I’m sure.

So, that seems to be it. Thank you all very, very much indeed. And we’ll be onto German Expressionism on Sunday.