Max Liebermann (1847-1935) and Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) were successful German painters, members of the original Berlin Secession, whose reputations outside Germany were minor, and faded considerably after 1940. They have, however, made a strong return in the last 25 years. Though they are frequently identified with particular schools of painting--Liebermann with Impressionism and Corinth with both Impressionism and Expressionism--neither painter fits well in the assigned groups. This lack of a strong affiliation, and their individuality, was one factor that led to their neglect. Another factor was a general disinclination for anything German in America and much of Europe. Despite considerable French influence, both men remained firmly associated with German artistic traditions, and Corinth had often called for a specifically Germanic art. The third factor was the success of those German painters and graphic artists who were less equivocally aligned with Expressionism--Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Heckel, Kirchner, Marc and Nolde--and less in tune with the nineteenth century. In the postwar era, for many of those who sold, bought, studied and thought about twentieth-century art, the various Expressionist groups, especially because of their opposition to fascism, were German art. As a broader view of the subject began, inevitably, to open up, Liebermann and Corinth emerged as painters of great merit whose individual development was as interesting as that of the better-known artists.
Around the turn of the century, when Corinth and Liebermann became important artistic leaders in Berlin, they were, along with the painter Max Slevogt, grouped into the so-called "Triumvirate of German Impressionism," a phrase attributed to the art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer. The phrase may simply have been a device intended to give important, but generally unclassifiable, artists a label that would earn general approbation and excite intere...