Max Liebermann
flower shrubs at the gardener's house to the north, 1928

Artist
Max Liebermann

Title
flower shrubs at the gardener's house to the north

Year of creation
1928

Technique and dimensions
oil on canvas, 74 x 53 cm

Year of acquisition
1997

In 1909, Liebermann acquired a plot of land on the Großer Wannsee, the following year he had a villa built on it and, with the advice of his friend Alfred Lichwark, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, began to create a carefully thought-out garden. Since the beginning of the First World War, Liebermann no longer traveled to Holland in the summer. The garden at Wannsee became a refuge for him and his immediate family, and above all it provided the motifs for numerous pictures over the last twenty years of work.

These garden pictures defy stylistic classification; some stay close to the subject matter, others go to the limit of abstraction. But there is always an impression of nature first, which he forms into an image. In 1929, Liebermann wrote in the paper "The Jewish Magazine" and thus built on the beliefs of his youth: "Born to see, all my ideas emanate from intuition. Spinoza's 'deus sive natura' probably best formulates my world view."

Lichtwark was also the author of popular writings about the new garden art. In his book "Makartbouquet and Bouquet of Flowers" he describes the admiration of an acquaintance - who one can probably assume is Liebermann - to whom he shows the traditional garden of a marsh farmer near Hamburg: "If I have a villa built at home, (... ) then I'll have a garden built like this. I'll send my gardener here to learn something (...) So we sat and were happy about this well-preserved structure of ancient art tradition in front of us a frame in front of his eyes and tried out picture motifs, as painters do. One could paint a hundred pictures here, he said, one more beautiful than the other."

Liebermann painted over a hundred pictures of his garden; a main motif, especially from the 1920s, is the flowering shrubs at the gardener's house. Max Liebermann sold this garden painting, created in the summer of 1928, in October to the banker Hugo Neuberg, whose wife Olga he painted in the same year. It was acquired from the possession of the descendants in 1997 by the Association of Friends of the National Gallery.

Angelika Wesenberg