Max Liebermann – A Key to the Garden

In 1909, Max Liebermann acquires a property with lake access on the west shore of Lake Wannsee. He commissions the architect Paul Otto Baumgarten to design a »classical« country house. His idea is a country house »built by a city dweller«. He meticulously lays out the large garden together with his friend Alfred Lichtwark: an anatomy of strictly mapped symmetry, composed of flower terraces, formally arranged flowerbeds, and hedge gardens.

For twenty years, the »Palace on the Lake« (Max Liebermann) serves as the summer residence of the painter and his family. Summer after summer, in more than 200 paintings dedicated to the garden, one of his most extensive series of motifs takes shape, in which Liebermann gains a deep understanding of nature’s metamorphoses and ren- ders the sensuality of what is seen through endless metaphors of color.

Max Liebermann perceives the changing light on blooming flowerbeds – unlike Monet, who sought to alter both his own and the viewer’s perception of nature – through the conception of a poetic realism: initiation and completion, one of the most significant late paths of Impressionism.

The first exhibition of Max Liebermann in the history of the gallery builds on a series of major museum presentations in recent years. Liebermann’s works have been shown, among other institutions, at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Leicester Museums & Galleries. Museum Barberini in Potsdam currently presents a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the artist and German Impressionism.