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.

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