Jewish artists in the museum

The collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum contains numerous pictures by Jewish artists. Here we show a small selection.

Max Liebermann (1847–1935), Two Dutch peasant women 1898.

A significant impressionist painter, Max Liebermann was among the best known German artists of the early 20th century. He was president of both the Berlin Secession and the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. His famous comment on the Nazi takeover was ‘I can’t eat as much as I could vomit.’ A few months later, he resigned his presidency and memberships and lived, a rather embittered recluse, in Berlin, where he died in 1935. Painted on one of Liebermann’s many trips to the Netherlands, the picture shows two Dutch peasant women. From 1872, Max Liebermann travelled regularly for study purposes to the Netherlands and spent the summer months there every year.

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Farm at Bazincourt 1884.

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a well-known French impressionist. It was a heavy blow for him when many artist friends turned their backs on him. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, for example, slandered Pissarro’s family as part of ‘that Jewish race of miserly cosmopolitans and cunning shopkeepers’ who only came to France ‘to make money’. This outburst was triggered by the affair of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, wrongfully accused of being a German spy, resulting in a wave of anti-Semitism in France – the darkest chapter of Impressionism. The painting shows a farm on the banks of the river Epte in Normandy which Pissarro depicted several times. He could see the building from his house.

Eduard Bendemann (1811–1889), Mourning Jews in Exile 1832.

Eduard Bendemann was one of the most important historical and portrait painters of the 19th century. ‘Mourning Jews in Exile’ is one of his most famous works. The mourners reflect the hopelessness of the 1830s, when there was hardly any political freedom in Germany and Jews existed on the margins of bourgeois society. The painter may have intended the green of the willow as a glimmer of hope.