Levitan – Gottlieb – Liebermann
Three Jewish Painters in Their Historical Context
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Historiography has discovered pictures (once again). That applies to the works of Isaak Levitan, Maurycy Gottlieb, and Max Liebermann. These three painters, all of Jewish origin, were almost contemporaries, but they lived in very different social and political surroundings. Liebermann belonged to the bourgeoisie in Germany; Gottlieb, a representative of Polish Jewry, was embedded in the ambivalent tapestry of Jewish-Polish relations in Austrian Galicia; and Levitan, not least through his friendship with Anton Chekhov, was integrated into the artistic circles of Russia. The influence of their different lifeworlds on the motifs they selected and on their reception by contemporaries and posterity illustrate the diversity of Jewish constructs of identity in Europe.
(Osteuropa 8-10/2008, pp. 247–264)