Max Liebermann, the son of a wealthy Berlin Jewish family, was a dominant figure in the German art world in the late-Imperial- and Weimar periods. He initially painted Dutch peasants in a realist style, then led the antiestablishment naturalist movement in the 1880s and 1890s, and, after 1895, worked for many years in an impressionist style. He was famous for his portraits and his scenes of bourgeois life. Liebermann helped found and served as the president of the progressive Berlin Secession from 1898 to 1910 and was president of the Prussian Academy of Arts from 1920 until Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, when Liebermann was forced to resign his position.
The Dutch Sewing School is from a period in Max Liebermann’s career when Dutch peasants were a common subject in his work. The sewing school seen here was in an orphanage in Amsterdam. While he…
Philistine (?), “Asiatics,” and other captives, Medinet-Habu, Egypt, 12th century BCE. The relief depicts captives of Ramses III (reigned 1187–1156 BCE). The second man from the right is one of the…
Freed deliberately designed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to create a sense of disorientation and alienation, even terror, in keeping with the museum’s subject matter. Though it is not based on a…