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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Max Liebermann

Boy and Girl on a Village Street

ca. 1897
Pastel on Paper.
76.2 x 60 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1998.31
)
Room 33
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
In the summer of 1897 Liebermann pursued his studies in Laren, a small village in Holland, in preparation for a painting entitled On the Way to School in Laren. Erich Hancke, a friend and biographer, described the place:«The village is still unusual even for Holland. It lies not far from Zuiderzee, perhaps a two-hour walk away, in flat moorland, and its primitive wooden houses are hidden in the gardens and under the elms growing in many rows along the paths to such an extent that the whole looks almost like a copse. The people there also have a special appearance, the girls are striking in the form, delicacy and porcelain-like quality of their faces.»

The girl in this pastel wears school clothes: a brown skirt with a red apron, dark stockings and clogs. She obviously poses for the painter with her little brother. Their seriousness and composure comes from being the subject of a painting and the fact that they are also on their way to school. The children live in a protected environment: in the background we see a house and women in local costumes chatting. A newspaper photograph of 1899, which shows Liebermann´s studio in Berlin, includes a smaller version, now lost, of this painting.

After a course of study in Weimar, Lieberman first went to Paris. He was interested in the Barbizon school of painting, especially in François Millet. However, after the Franco-Prussian war, Millet refused to have any dealings with Germans and Liebermann never really felt that he was welcome there.

In Holland, however, Lieberman felt immediately at home: the wide landscape under a high sky generally dotted with bright clouds, the friendly people, and the orderly communities touched a profound chord with the painter. With a study visit in 1876, he began his almost yearly journeys to Holland until the outbreak of World War I. In 1884 the Dutch-Jewish painter Jozef Israëls, a friend of the Liebermanns, introduced the couple to the small artists´ village of Laren on their honeymoon. In 1886 the painter Jan Veth drew his attention to flax spinning there, prompting the creation of one of Liebermann´s great paintings, Flax Barn in Laren (National Gallery Berlin).

In the summer weeks of 1897 and 1898, the artist was again in Laren. In the meantime his interest had turned towards exterior space. A decisive change of direction towards plein air painting and atmosphere, the phenomena of light and air and their influence on colour is unmistakable. Liebermann paints the soft, always rather hazy light in this region, surrounded and crossed by water. He paints peasant women on flat paths, women sewing in front of their house, children playing in the street. They are part of the cultivated scenery, the village environment, they stand «[...] facing nature with a sense of intimacy and piety.»

Liebermann's conversion from dark studio painting to lighter, sketchier plein air painting took place in Holland.

Liebermann did not turn to pastel until the end of the 1880s. He used it for rapid, coloured nature studies or to test the structure and effect of the paintings he had in mind. Between 1890 and 1898 he produced numerous pastels.

The Flax Barn in Laren received the First Gold Medal in Munich in 1887, but it was not until 1897, on his fiftieth birthday, that he was honoured with a sumptuous extraordinary exhibition.

Highly comparable attempts were pursued by the Galerie Cassirer founded at the same time as the Secession in Berlin. Its exclusive rooms were inaugurated with three small groups of paintings with works by Liebermann and the Frenchmen Constantin Meunier and Edgar Degas, whose pastels Liebermann greatly admired. At Cassirer, Liebermann showed his most recent paintings, among them On the Way to School in Laren, a work very much in the spirit of the times. In a review by Rainer Maria Rilke on Liebermann´s contribution, the poet wrote: «He appears to grow towards brilliant, literally-conceived Impressionism which unfolds in lavish colour across the whole surface.»

Angelika Wesenberg

19th CenturyWork on paperPastelPaper
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Boy and Girl on a Village Street. Niño y niña en una calle de pueblo, c. 1897
Boy and Girl on a Village Street
Max Liebermann

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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Boy and Girl on a Village Street. Niño y niña en una calle de pueblo, c. 1897
Boy and Girl on a Village Street
Max Liebermann

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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