Self-portrait – Bust

Details

Eberle 1917/20.

Literature:

Kunst und Künstler, Max Liebermann (special issue on the artist’s seventieth birthday), vol. XV, no. 10, July 1917, with b/w illus. p. 462.

Provenance:

Galerie Oscar Hermes, Munich, stamped on the reverse on the stretcher;

Dr Peter Nathan, Zurich 1964, on the reverse on the stretcher with the label;

Weinmüller, Munich 5 November 1965, lot 170, with illus. plate 73;

Georg Schäfer Collection, Schweinfurt, each with the label and inv. no. 87510617 on the reverse of the frame backing and stretcher;

Privately owned, Germany.

Descrizione

– From the important group of self-portraits comprising almost 70 works, which were created from C. 1902 onwards

– Not offered on the art market for almost 60 years

– Objectively sober self-portrait of the 70-year-old

When Max Liebermann began to explore the subject of the self-portrait, he was 55 years old and a successful artist. He was a professor at the Royal Academy of Arts and president of the Berlin Secession. He created his first self-portrait in 1902/03, not out of a need to explore his own self, but because the Uffizi in Florence asked for one for their collection. Accepting the commission is probably also due to the fact that he was making his first portraits of well-known personalities at this time. From 1910 onwards, he continued to focus intensively on self-portraiture. By the time of his death in 1935, Liebermann had produced almost 70 self-portraits.

In keeping with his matter-of-fact, sober work ethic, the 70-year-old painter portrays himself almost frontally in the present portrait, dressed in a bourgeois suit in front of the bare studio wall, carefully registering the changes in his physiognomy. Liebermann shows himself without the attributes of a painter, serious and collected with a tired look around his eyes.

The small self-portrait was published for the first time in 1917 in the magazine “Kunst und Künstler” on the occasion of his 70th birthday, on which its dating is based.