At the end of July 1908, the sixty-one-year-old Max Liebermann painted the "Beach near Nordwijk" in his summer retreat.

Liebermann has been in the seaside resort on the Dutch North Sea coast since the beginning of the month, but so far, he complains in a letter to the director of the Berlin National Gallery, Hugo von Tschudi, that the bad weather has prevented him from working.

The weather records confirm his dissatisfaction: On July 15, the average temperature in Nordwijk was 13.2 degrees Celsius, the amount of precipitation was 16.2 millimeters.

On July 20, Liebermann's birthday, there was no more precipitation, but the wind was blowing at 5 Beaufort from the north-northeast at an average temperature of 15.8 degrees.

There is no talk of climate change yet.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

The rain has cleared on Liebermann's painting.

Thick white clouds chase through the blue sky over the beach.

In front, the wind sweeps heaps of grains of sand across the wet ground, behind them beach carriages, moving changing rooms, line up in the shallow water.

Its users float as distant colorful dots in the wave foam.

In the foreground, on the left, two boys are splashing about in an arm of water left behind by the night's tide, while their governess and their third child, a girl with a bonnet, look on.

On the right a woman in clogs is reading a letter.

Behind her, a rider in a blue cloak looks out at the choppy sea.

Liebermann dabbed all this with quick, almost impatient brushstrokes, conjured it up, brought it into being.

Appropriate for the weather, his palette ranges from sandy ocher to blue and bottle green to the dark brown of the horizon, but in between are flecks of bright color interspersed like laughter in a ballroom, a yellow, a bright red, a cracking white, a flash of bare skin.

Art critics regard Liebermann, the most upper-class of German painters, as boring, and people are embarrassed that his early work lags behind Courbet and Manet, and his late work lags behind Monet's Water Lilies and Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire.

You only have to look closely to see what the unique quality of this painter consists of: in the precise sketch of the moment, which confidently undercuts the color frenzy of Impressionism,

a balance of permanence and ephemerality rare in art history.

One of the conditions of this art of the moment is the awareness that the world it captures has already passed at the moment of its becoming an image.

Liebermann's old-masterly cheerfulness lies in the fact that he does not dry up this vanitas feeling into a pleasant gloom like the Symbolists, but lets it drive him creatively.

In his early sixties he is at the peak of his abilities

In the exhibition of paintings from Nordwijk, with which the Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee celebrates the painter's 175th birthday, one can see how Liebermann's style changed between 1905, when he discovered the seaside resort in the dunes, and 1913, when he last time came, developed.

Not at all.

In his late fifties, early sixties, he is at the height of his skills, effortlessly mastering the interplay of impressionistic forms and naturalistic details.

What appeals to him in Nordwijk, as before in Scheveningen and Amsterdam, is the dialogue with the classics: with Vermeer (“House Entrance”), Ruisdael (“Dunes”) and Millet (“Vegetable Cart”).

But instead of outlining each brick like the master from Delft, he turns the village scene into a sketch.

Here, too, he is not interested in the duration, but in the moment.