Max Liebermann

Max Liebermann was a painter and printmaker whose work, heavily inspired by French Impressionism, was alternately celebrated and maligned by his countrymen. In 1899, he became the leader of the Berlin Secession, an artist’s group of which Kollwitz was a member. Kollwitz fit well with the Secessionists because of the prevailing mode of socially oriented imagery promoted by Liebermann and contemporaries like Adolph von Menzel. This etching, with its subject of working-class men conversing at a table, has many similarities to the style and subject matter of Kollwitz’s Consultation in this case.