Mending the Nets

5 February 1892

The “Group of Eleven” is formed

Eleven independent artists joined forces in Berlin — the basis of the later Berlin Secession, which led the opposition to the conservative academic school. According to Lovis Corinth, soon after its founding Liebermann became the “secret leader of the eleven anarchists”.

1892

Moving into his parents' mansion on Pariser Platz

When his mother's health failed — a few months before her death — Liebermann moved his family into the mansion on Pariser Platz that his father had bought. He kept to a strict routine, working from ten in the morning to six in the evening in his studio on Auguste-Viktoria-Straße, and confessed that he had become a real bourgeois.

1892

The Edvard Munch exhibition scandal in Berlin

The Association of Berlin Artists staged an exhibition of 55 paintings by Munch, but a general assembly voted 120 to 105 to close it, which finally split Anton von Werner's conservatives from Liebermann's modernists. Sixty protesting members of the Association united under his leadership in the “Free Association of Artists”.

1894

Death of his father Louis Liebermann

Shortly before, late feelings for his father had awakened in Liebermann and the old disagreements had receded; after their reconciliation, the parting was especially hard. He became one of the heirs to a millionaire's fortune and the owner of the mansion on Pariser Platz — the police allowed the studio under its roof only in 1896, through the intervention of the minister of public works Karl von Thielen.

1896

To Paris with Hugo von Tschudi: Manet's “Winter Garden” and Degas

The new director of the Old National Gallery, Hugo von Tschudi, took Liebermann to Paris as an adviser on acquisitions; he talked Tschudi out of buying Manet's “Winter Garden”, fearing that even a naturalistic picture could cause a scandal in Berlin at the time. Through Tschudi Liebermann met Edgar Degas, and with the Prussian government's consent he was made a knight of the Legion of Honour.

1896

Oxford and London: Whistler

Liebermann spent ten days in Oxford, where his brother Felix was awarded an honorary doctorate, and in London he met James McNeill Whistler, whose etchings in the manner of the old masters made a great impression on him.