Max Liebermann
Stevenstift in Leiden (1st version), 1889/90

Artist
Max Liebermann

Title
Stevenstift in Leiden (1st version)

Year of creation
1889/90

Technique and dimensions
oil on canvas, 78 x 100 cm

Year of acquisition
1978

"A perspective line of buildings, so that the painter only needs to concern himself with the first people sitting in the foreground, the others behind them are only hinted at and in Liebermann's hinting they become large. (...) Liebermann despises the brush. He only works "Even with a brush, spatula, thumb and with a trowel," Georg Brandes criticized the picture exhibited in Paris - and thus precisely captured its peculiarity.

The picture of the Stevenstift in Leyden, a private institution for the elderly and needy, is in a row with the depictions of the orphanage and the old men's house in Amsterdam. They are all built according to a similar compositional scheme: there is the path leading into the depths and a strongly aligned house wall, in front of which women and men are doing manual work or having conversations. In the picture "Stevenstift in Leyden", however, the path goes almost vertically into the depths, so only the two women in the front are detailed, as Brandes noted. The receding of the house wall corresponds to the motif and spatial predominance of the garden; one of the surrounding walls leads diagonally into the picture. The painter friend Hancke saw this as a mistake; he suspected that Liebermann was depicting more "than could be overlooked from one vantage point. A piece of the garden on the right could be omitted."

But Liebermann was particularly interested in the garden. Above all, he tried out his new spatula technique on it. Bushes and trees are only captured in summary, as an impression of color and space; it was only with his later garden pictures that Liebermann tried again to do justice to the abundance of plants in a tactile manner using color matter.

The strongly tapered path is also a masterpiece of abstract painting, “a good piece of painting,” Liebermann would have said. We know from his biographer Erich Hancke that Liebermann often layered the paint thickly on top of each other, scraped some of it down again and reapplied it until he found the color tone he had in mind. Sometimes he would take a sharp shoemaker's knife and cut the colored surface to a height. Only as a result of such a lengthy process does the wonderfully colorful Abbey Trail seem conceivable.

Angelika Wesenberg