Jewish Artist' – my daily art display

Mark (Max) Gertler. Part 1.

Max Gertler by Lady Ottoline Morrell vintage snapshot print, 1917. © National Portrait Gallery, London

My featured artist today is Markz Gertler. He was one of the most prominent artists of his generation and an early member of the New English Art Club, elected in 1912. He was a painter of figures, portraits and still-life. Markz was born on December 9th 1891 at 16 Gun Street, Spitalfields, London. He was the youngest of five children born to Austrian-Jewish immigrants from Poland, Louis Gentler and Kate (Golda) Berenbaum. Markz had to elder brothers, Harry and Jacob, known as Jack and two elder sisters, Deborah and Sophie.

Dorset Street, Spitalfields (c.1910)

By the 19th century, most of the area’s around Spitalfields had traditional industries, including silk weaving, but they had moved elsewhere, although the area still produced some textiles. This decline of the local industry destroyed Spitalfields and it became a poverty-stricken, overpopulated area with little work. The grand houses which had been built by the Huguenots were turned into slums, and the area became unsafe. By the late 19th century, many people considered the place the most criminal in London.

The Rabbi and his Grandchild by Mark Gertler (1913)

The following year after Markz was born, 1892, because of the terrible economic downturn in the area, the family moved back to Markz’s mother’s native city of Przemyśl in Galicia, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but now is situated in south-eastern Poland close to the Ukraine border. Life for the family was little better here as Max’s father worked as an innkeeper but this failed and now the family were financially desperate. It could have been that his father felt guilty about not being able to support his family but one night in 1893, Gertler’s father Louis, without telling anyone, left his family destitute and on the brink of starvation, and went off to America to search for work. Much later he contacted his wife to say that once he got established in America, he would send for them and all would be well. It never happened as all his hopes of making a fortune in America ended in failure.

Whitechapel High Street (1905)

Following yet another business failure Louis Gertler left America and returned to England and the London borough of Whitechapel, the heart of London’s Jewish quarter. He set himself up as a furrier and in 1896 he arranged for his family to join him. Once in England, his son’s first name was changed from the Polish Markz to Mark.

Portrait of Mark Gertler by John Currie (1913)

Gertler spent his early formative years in Whitechapel, London, a poor Jewish community, and attended nearby schools in Settles Street and Deal Street between 1897 and 1906. He displayed a gifted artistic talent even as a young child and was said to have been motivated by pavement artists, advertising posters, and it was the autobiography of the great English painter William Powell Frith, which made Max determined to become a professional artist. In 1906, at the age of fifteen, on leaving school so as to earn some money for his family Mark (known as Max) became an apprentice at the stained-glass company Clayton and Ball. He hated working there and rarely spoke of the experience in later years. During this time, he would attend evening classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic but in 1907 he had to drop out of college due to his family’s perilous finances. In 1908, Max was placed third in a national art competition and then realised that he could become a great artist. In 1908 Gerter met the artist, William Rothenstein. After seeing Max’s work Rothenstein wrote to Max’s father:

“…It is never easy to prophesy regarding the future of an artist but I do sincerely believe that your son has gifts of a high order, and that if he will cultivate them with love and care, that you will one day have reason to be proud of him. I believe that a good artist is a very noble man, and it is worth while giving up many things which men consider very important, for others which we think still more so. From the little I could see of the character of your son, I have faith in him and I hope and believe he will make the best possible use of the opportunities I gather you are going to be generous enough to give him…”

However, knowing the cost of studying art and that the family would be ununable to pay his tuition fees he became downhearted.

Portrait of a Girl by Mark Gertler (1912)

Having the money to pay for tuition fees, he needed a sponsor to put him forward to the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art. This he received with a recommendation from William Rothenstein, an English painter, printmaker, draughtsman, lecturer, and writer on art who lived in the affluent London borough of Hampstead and who held a number of soirées which often included many well-known artists and some young and up and coming ones, such as Mark. Mark Gertler entered the Slade in 1908 and studied there for three years. He was the first and youngest Jewish working-class student of his generation to do so.

In her 1989 biography A Life of Dora Carrington: 1893-1932 Gretchen Gerzina, wrote about Max Gertler’s arrival at the Slade, writing:

“…At the Slade, Mark was at first something of a misfit. He had started school late in life and had left it at the age of fourteen. His hair was short and his clothes were different. Most of all, however, the other students found him too serious and too intense. He was extremely handsome, with huge dark eyes, pale skin, and a thin body, and he was both solemn and passionate about his art. Only at the polytechnic had he finally been introduced to museums and systematic schooling in the history of art, including the old masters. When he first arrived at the Slade at seventeen, he had the fervour of a convert who has surmounted great obstacles for his religion. In contrast, his fellow students seemed privileged and rather frivolous. Yet his early opinions of them were not untouched by envy…”

Still Life by Mark Gertler

After a little time at the Slade, Max made friends with a group of very talented students all of whom would become famous artists, such as C.R.W. Nevinson, an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of the First World War, Stanley Spencer, John S. Currie, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Edward Wadsworth, Adrian Allinson and painter and draughtsman Rudolph Ihlee. This group became known as the Coster Gang because as writer David Boyd Haycock put it, they mostly wore black jerseys, scarlet mufflers and black caps or hats like the costermongers who sold fruit and vegetables from carts in the street.

Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery

In 1910, whilst he was still an art student at the Slade, Max began exhibiting some of his paintings at Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club. Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf. The idea for the Friday Club was inspired by her earlier involvements of café life in Paris. It was her wish to create a similar atmosphere, and the Friday Club held its first meeting in the summer of 1905 and that November the Club held its first exhibition. From 1910 until 1918, the Friday Club was based at the Alpine Club.

………to be continued.

Once again much of the information was gleaned from various Wikipedia sites but also these excellent websites:

Ben Uri Research Unit

Art UK

A Crisis of Brilliance

Spartacus Educational

Max Liebermann. Part 2.

Self portrait by Max Liebermann (1934)

Max Liebermann was Jewish, not a strict Orthodox Jew, but more of a secular Jew who regarded himself through assimilationist eyes. Maybe because of this he avoided painting religious subjects with the exception of a painting he completed in 1879 entitled The 12-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple With the Scholars.

Der zwölfjährige Jesus im Tempel (The Twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple) by Max Liebermann (1879)

The painting depicts twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, having been at the Festival of Passover in Jerusalem with his parents, but unbeknown to them, he had stayed behind in the city when they had set off to return home. The story continues as per the biblical tale (Luke 2:43-48):

“…After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they travelled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you…”

The setting for this painting is derived from Max’s visit to the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam in 1876 when he made architectural sketches of the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam. The curved staircase, which he later depicted as a spiral staircase in the painting, is a reference to the 16th-century Levantine Synagogue in Venice. The paned window on the upper edge of the painting also echoes the windows of the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam.

Liebermann originally depicted Jesus, not as a holy figure, but as a dark-haired boy with Semitic features and mannerisms, arguing the doctrine with his elders. The painting was first exhibited at the First International Art Show in Munich in 1879, at a time when antisemitic activism and propaganda was just starting to break out in Germany. The artwork caused a major outcry with critics terming the depiction blasphemous. The art critic for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, Friedrich Pecht, asserted that Liebermann had painted “the ugliest, know-it-all Jewish boy imaginable,” and went on to state that the artist had shown the Jewish elders as “a rabble of the filthiest haggling Jews.” More criticism rained down from upon high with the Crown Prince of Bavaria declaring that he was scandalised, and the Bavarian State Parliament even spent time debating the painting and Pecht’s comments. One Catholic MPs criticised the fact that it had been admitted into a State establishment knowing that the country had inhabitants who were overwhelmingly devout Christians. One deputy pronounced that Liebermann, being a Jew, should have known better than to paint such a scene and that the painting was reviled as “a stench in the nostrils of decent people” It seemed that Lieberman’s mistake was simply that as Liebermann was a Jew, he had depicted an overtly Jewish Jesus.

Preliminary Sketch

And yet in the painting we cannot understand the violent criticism of the detractors regarding Liebermann’s Jesus who is depicted as a long-haired, slightly effeminate, blond boy. However, this was not the original depiction as this is because Liebermann, in response to unrelenting criticism, repainted the figure before it was included in a Paris exhibition in 1884. Art historians know this as a sketch of the untouched 1879 version has been preserved, in which it can be seen that Liebermann had originally depicted a barefoot boy with short, unkempt dark hair and a stereotypical Jewish profile. Liebermann changed the young Jesus’s appearance with the figure once described as an “urchin” now appears as a serious, intelligent, perhaps slightly deferential child. However, the changes, did not change the mood of the German critics and the work was not exhibited again in Germany until the Berlin Secession exhibition of 1907.

Sewing School by Max Liebermann (1876)

In 1875 Liebermann left Paris and spent three months in Zandvoort in Holland. It was in this Dutch town that Max acquired a brighter and more less planned style by copying paintings by one of his favourite artists, Frans Hals. Max developed a practice of setting aside time between the idea for a motif coming to him and the implementation of the larger finished painting. When he returned to Paris in the autumn of 1875 he moved into a more spacious studio and began to convert his Dutch sketches into full sized works. He returned to the Netherlands in the summer of 1876 where he remained for several months. During this stay he met the etcher William Unger, who brought him into contact with Jozef Israëls and the Hague School. One example of this change of painting style was Liebermann’s work entitled Sewing School which he completed in 1876. The sewing school depicted in this painting was in an orphanage in Amsterdam. Liebermann had started his career as a realist painter, but by the time of this work, he was already establishing himself as an Impressionist-style painter.

Schusterwerkstatt (Cobbler’s Workshop) by Max Liebermann (1881)

During his visit to the Netherlands in the summer of 1880, Liebermann travelled to the small village of Dongen in North Brabant, in the southern Netherlands. It was here that he made a number of studies that would be used when completing the work in his studio. One example of this was his depiction of a cobbler in his workshop. At the workshop, he created studies that he later used for his 1881 painting Schusterwerkstatt, (Cobbler’s Workshop).

Altmännerhaus (Old Men’s Home) in Amsterdam by Max Liebermann (1881)

Having completed the Cobbler’s Workshop painting he travelled to Amsterdam on his way to returning to Munich. It was whilst in Amsterdam that he came across the Catholic Altmännerhaus (Old Men’s Home). He happened to glance into the garden of the establishment and saw a large group of older gentlemen dressed in black sitting on benches in the dappled sunlight. According to Erich Hancke’s 1914 book, Max Liebermann. Sein Leben und seine Werke:

“…He [Liebermann] had visited a friend at the Rembrandt Hotel, and when he looked out of the corridor window descending the stairs, his gaze fell down into a garden where many old men dressed in black were standing and sitting in a corridor bathed in sunlight […]. He later used a drastic analogy to characterize that moment: ‘It was as if someone were walking on a level path and suddenly stepped on a spiral spring that shot him up…”

Study for Old Men’s Home in Amsterdamby Max Liebermann (1881)

Liebermann immediately began to paint the scene and concentrated on the effect of light which was being filtered through a canopy of leaves and this dappled effect became known as “Liebermann’s sunspots” and would be seen in Liebermann’s later Impressionist depictions. He made two on-site portrait-format studies of the scene, one in oil and one in pastel, after which Liebermann painted the final picture in his Munich studio later that year. The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon and received an honourable mention. Furthermore, Léon Maître, a well-known collector of Impressionism, acquired several of Liebermann’s paintings.

Recreation Time in the Amsterdam Orphanage by Max Liebermann (1884)

Life in Paris was taking its toll on Liebermann. He needed to sell his artwork to prove to himself and his parents that he had not wasted his life. This continual pressure caused Lieberman to fall into periods of deep depression and his painting output declined, furthermore, the works he put into the Paris Salon were not getting the recognition he believed he had deserved. There was also still the anti-Prussian sentiment amongst the French and this did not help him sell his work. In all, he realised that the Netherlands or Germany were much more acceptable places to work and live. He left Paris and spent a couple of months in Venice before returning to Munich in 1878. It was here that he was able to enhance his status as an important progressive artist. Munich had everything Liebermann required – the artistic culture and patrons who supported him. He spent hours visiting the city’s museums and art galleries and creating everlasting and important friendships. He eventually left Munich and relocated to Berlin, his birthplace, in 1884, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Martha Marckwald by Anders Zorn (1896)

In that same year, 1884, that Max moved to Berlin he married Martha Marckwald, the fourth child of the German Jewish couple Ottilie and Heinrich Benjamin Marckwald, who ran a wool store in Berlin. When Martha’s father died in 1870, Max’s father Louis became the thirteen-year-old Martha’s guardian. The Marckwald and Liebermann families became even closer when Max’s elder brother Georg Liebermann married Martha’s elder sister Elsbeth. On September 14th 1884, thirty-seven-year-old Max Liebermann married twenty-six-year-old Martha. It was a marriage that would last more than fifty years until Max died in 1935. In August 1885 Max and Martha’s only child, Käthe, was born and in 1892.

Max’s mother died on August 12th 1892, aged 70 and his father died two years later on April 29th 1894, aged 75. Although the death of his parents was a sad time for Max, he was finally released from their unrelenting words of warning as to the perilous status of an artist. Max moved into his family’s Berlin home in Pariser Platz where he lived out the remainder of his life.

Liebermann Villa at Wannsee

In 1909, overwhelmed by the noisy life in the German city, the Liebermann family bought a plot of land in the Alsen summer villa colony on the northern shore of the Kleiner and western shore of the Großer Wannsee at Wannsee, some twenty kms south-west of Berlin, close to Potsdam. It was here that they built themselves a summer home, somewhere to retire to during the hot summer months when city life became very oppressive. The Villa was designed by the architect Paul Otto Baumgarten, the garden by Liebermann in collaboration with the then-director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark.

Martha Liebermann in the garden at Wannsee

Their summer home was situated amidst the magnificent villas of this impressive Berlin colony, embedded in a park, and represented a unique cultural landscape of the time of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic.

The Villa at Wannsee by Max Liebermann (1930)

Flowering Shrubs by the Gardner’s Cottage by Max Liebermann (1928)

The Flower Terrace at Wannsee by Max Liebermann (1915)

During the following years, Liebermann had designed a beautiful garden at the Villa Wannsee. He was so proud of the finishing results that the garden became the subject of many of Liebermann’s painting.

The Artist in His Studio by Max Liebermann (1932)

During the latter decade of the nineteenth century Liebermann continued living and painting in Berlin and would spend his summers at Wannsee or the Netherlands. Liebermann, like many of his contemporary Berlin artists, were dissatisfied with how they were being treated by the Association of Berlin Artists and the restrictions on contemporary art imposed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, so sixty-five of them seceded as a demonstration against the standards set by the Association and the government endorsed art. This break-away became known as the Berlin Secession and its aim was to form a “free association for the organization of artistic exhibitions”. In 1898, Liebermann became the President of the Berlin Secession, which was simply a group of artists that was formed as an alternative to the conservative arts establishment.

Two Riders on the Beach by Max Liebermann (1901)

The Berlin Secession championed new forms of modern art and were not be tied down to and be dominated by the old-fashioned academic art favoured by the Berlin Academy. These break-away groups from the art establishments were not new occurrences as the same happened with the Munich Secession in 1892 and the Vienna Secession in 1897. The initial breakaway took place in Paris in 1890 when the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts along with its exhibition arm, the Salon au Champs-de-Mars, was formed as a modern alternative to the official Société des Artistes Français and its exhibition arm, the Salon de Champs-Élysées. These break-away groups all wanted the same thing – the rejection of the official arts governing bodies due to their aversion of avant-garde art such as Impressionism, forms of Post-Impressionist painting and Naturalism, as well as their obstructive exhibition policies, which were inclined to support time-honoured painters and sculptors over their younger, more modernist contemporaries.

Marthe Liebermann with her grand-daughter Maria by Max Liebermann (1922)

In 1920, Liebermann became president of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, which was the highpoint of his career and signified how the Academy had changed over since the time of the Berlin Secession.

Portrait of President Paul von Hindenburg by Max Liebermann (1927)

Being a Jew, Liebermann had got used to the anti-Semitism in his homeland but by the early 30s with the rise and coming to power of the National Socialists it had noticeably worsened. In a way, it was a good thing that Liebermann died quietly in his sleep at the family home on February 8th 1935 aged 87 as he avoided bearing witness to the atrocities which followed. In 1938, his daughter Käthe her husband Kurt Riezler and their twenty-one-year-old daughter Maria were forced to flee the country and go to America.

The Graves of Max and Martha Liebermann at the Senerfelderplatz Jewish Cemetery, Berlin

They tried to persuade Max’s widow, Martha, to also emigrate but she refused to leave the land where her husband was buried. Martha Liebermann remained in Berlin, ultimately committing suicide in 1943 to escape her impending deportation to a concentration camp.

Most of the information for this blog came from the excellent website Liebermann Villa am Wannsee which goes into detail about his life and works.

I also consulted the informative website on all things art: The Art Story

Information regarding the painting, A Twelve-Year-Old Jewish Boy, came from the website: Art and Faith Matter/s

Sionah Tagger

In many of my blogs I have featured European artist who had ancestors who were part of the European Jewish community such as Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Max Liebermann, Diego Rivera and Isaac and Joseph Israels. As I look down the list of Jewish painters it appears to be dominated by male artists. In this blog today I want to feature one of the great female Jewish painters, Sionah Tagger, who was one of the pioneers of Modernist painting in Israel.

Sionah Tagger was born in Jaffa, Israel on August 17^th 1900. She was the eldest daughter of Shmuel and Sultana Tagger, who were members of the Ahuzat Bayit group, the founders of Tel Aviv. Their house where she was born was at 3 Rothschild Boulevard and was the first two-storey house in Tel Aviv. Her ancestors hailed from Spain and in the latter part of the fifteenth century they moved to Holland and then later they lived in Germany and Bulgaria. Sionah’s father Shmuel, when he was just an infant, left Bulgaria with his family and immigrated to Palestine in 1868. In 1890, when he was twenty-two-years old, he married Sultana, who was the daughter of a wealthy resident of the Old City in Jerusalem. The newly-weds moved to Nahalat Shiva, the third neighbourhood built outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1860s. Later, they moved to Jaffa, where Shmuel set up a business importing furniture and trading in leather. As a practicing Jew, Schmuel was involved in the founding of Jaffa’s central synagogue and of the Ohel Moed synagogue in Tel Aviv.

Sionah Tagger 1900 - 1988 Young Girl on the Beach, — *Young Girl on the Beach by Sionah Tagger (1918)*

Sionah Tagger had seven brothers and sisters – Asher, Baruch, Miriam, Shoshana, Hezkia, Shalom and Yosef. She was the oldest girl. Sionah attended a number of different schools in Jaffa, Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem including the School for Girls in Neve Tzedek, the Levinsky Teachers Seminar and the Alliance School in Jerusalem, before starting her first artistic education with Avraham Eisentein-Aldema, one of the early Israelie bohemians. From there she began evening classes at the Hatomer Cooperative Studio at the Gymnqsia Herzliya in Tel-Aviv, which had been founded by Yaacov Peremen. Yosef Constantinovsky (Constant) and Yitzhak Frenkel were the most important painting teachers at the studio. Both instilled in their students the spirit of Russian Futurist Cubism, which was based on French art.

Ziona Tagger 1900- 1988 Children in the Yard — *Children in the Yard by Sionah Tagger*

From the age of twenty-one, Sionah enrolled on a course at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, despite her former teachers being opposed to the Academic, Romantic style of the Bezalel School’s artistic training. Whether she had been swayed by the views of her previous art teachers, Sionah was one of the students who protested against Boris Shatz, the founder of the Belazel School and Abel Pann one of the principal lecturers for their conservative approach

Sionah Tagger — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes — *The Train Passing through Neveh Tsedek by Sionah Tagger (1928)*

Sionah first exhibited some of her works at the “First Artistic Exhibition” organized by Ferman at Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. In the late 1923 with support from her family she travelled to Paris, where she stayed for two years, living in the Montparnasse district of the capital. She attended the newly opened academy of André Lhote which was situated close to the Montparnasse railway station. The academy of André Lhote was much sought after and attracted an unprecedented number of international students. During her time in Paris, she studied draughtsmanship, composition and painting and over time she became influenced by Cubism, the revolutionary new approach to representing reality. The movement was founded by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1907/8 but by the 1920’s when Sionah was in Paris she was attracted to the Fauvist works of André Derain. Although she returned home in 1925, she became the first female member of the Hebrew Arts Association. She revisited the Lhote Academy during her stay in Paris in 1930/31, as well attending the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

After two years, Sionah returned to Israel and joined the local group of modern artists. They organised many exhibitions, some at the Ohel Theatre, at the Tower of David in Jerusalem. In 1931, Tagger held a solo exhibition at Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv, which was titled “Framed Portraits.” Sionah also participated in several exhibitions in Paris. On December 7th 1934 she gave birth to her son Avraham who would later become a member of the Knesset from 1977 to 1996 and for a time was the Minister of Agriculture. In 1938, Sionah exhibited her paintings in Cairo, at the Friedman-Goldenberg Gallery.

During World War II, four of her brothers joined the British army and in 1942, Sionah Tagger, who at the time had an eight-year-old son, volunteered for the British Army, serving in one of the British army’s ATS divisions where she served mainly in Egypt and in the Western Desert where they carried out administration work. They were later also trained as ambulance and delivery drivers. World War II was at its peak, and the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine was in danger. In 1944, Sionah was released from the army and went back to Tel Aviv, where she held a large exhibition of her paintings in the lobby of Habima Theatre. The exhibition included 40 oil paintings, 30 watercolours and sketches depicting the experiences of female soldiers in the British army.

Although she had extended stays in Paris, she also journeyed around Germany, Italy and Spain but always returned to her Israeli homeland where she would paint local landscapes. In 1948 Tagger represented Israel in the Venice Biennale. In the Northern Israeli town of Safed there was an artist’s colony. The founding members of the Artists’ Colony settled in Safed shortly after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and they took over an abandoned mosque which they turned into an exhibition centre for their artists’ cooperative. This Artists’ Colony was very important in the development of Israeli art.

Sionah arrived in Safed in 1951 and bought a nineteenth-century church at the heart of the city’s Christian-Arab neighbourhood. A short time after she bought the building, Sionah related that a priest had come to the house to carry off the bell that had been located in the church’s bell tower. Thirty years after settling in Safed Sionah recalled early life in the Safed Colony:

“…The views and alleyways lured painters to Safed. In the evenings we would walk around the city and talk about art. After Castel came Isakov, Shemi, Frankel, Marzer, Holtzman, Amitai, Lerner, Zachs and myself. We had no electricity during the artist’s colony’s first days, and so we used oil lamps instead. Our parties were all illuminated by the light of an oil lamp, and each one of us would tend to it in turn. Water was also scarce, and so we would carry water in cans from the dormant spring located in the artists’ colony…”

Tagger held over 40 solo exhibitions, partly because she had to make her living from the sale of her works, and she participated in numerous group exhibitions in Israel and abroad. Sionah Tagger died on June 16th 1988, aged 87.