"Pure Painting" and the French Avant-Garde

From the 1860s young German painters were following developments in French art. In 1869 Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet exhibited in Munich, and Courbet visited the city, attracting the intense admiration of Wilhelm Leibl and his circle of friends. Their realism and interest in pure painterly values were given fresh impetus by this encounter. By the end of 1869, Leibl himself was in Paris where he showed at the Salon. A decade later, Max Liebermann traveled often to the French capital, committed to making modern French art known to German artists and vice versa. The loose brushwork and unpretentious subject matter of his Villa at Hilversum (top left) reveal the profound influence of Manet, whose work Liebermann collected.

After Hugo von Tschudi became director of the Nationalgalerie in 1896, he acquired modern French paintings by Manet, Claude Monet, and Auguste Renoir, and the first painting by Paul Cézanne to be purchased by a museum anywhere in the world. Conservative artists and academicians objected and Emperor William II saw modern French art as a pernicious influence on German painters. In 1909 he forced Tschudi's resignation. The small, distinguished group of French impressionist paintings that Tschudi brought to Berlin represented the first attempt by any museum to form a significant collection of such works.

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