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Liebermann was anathema to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser had no use for painters who, as he said, “made misery even more hideous than it already is.” For a time, Wilhelm and his cultural bureaucrats managed to keep Liebermann from displaying his works in official exhibitions. They could not, however, prevent him from appearing in private shows, such as those organized by “The Eleven,” a shortlived offshoot of the Association of Berlin Painters. With time, moreover, Liebermann became so popular that he had to be admitted to the official salon, where he won the Gold Medal in 1897. In that same year he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Art and made a professor at the Royal Academy—both accolades he considered long overdue.

Liebermann’s success did not signal a definitive or uncontested triumph for modernist art in Berlin. In 1898 a jury on which he sat recommended that a small gold medal be awarded to Käthe Kollwitz for her brilliant etching cycle The Revolt of the Weavers, based on Hauptmann’s naturalist drama. Such awards could not be presented without approval of the kaiser, who vetoed the prize with the words, “Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that’s really going too far. That would amount to a debasement of every high distinction. Orders and honors belong on the chests of deserving men.” Another chest, albeit male, that the kaiser deemed un-suited for a medal belonged to the brilliant landscape artist Walter Leistikow; Wilhelm insisted that as a hunter he knew more about nature than a painter who colored his trees blue.

The Kollwitz affair was the last straw for painters like Liebermann and Leistikow, who had long been frustrated over the attempts by the kaiser and his advisers (especially von Werner) to control the local art scene. In 1898 they launched the Berlin Sezession (Secession), a revolt of disaffected artists modeled on earlier secessions in Vienna and Munich. Their chief purpose was to organize exhibitions in which they could display the art they respected. For financial support they relied on donations from wealthy patrons, many of them Jewish. Their most important backers were the Cassirer cousins, Bruno and Paul, who owned a gallery in the Kantstrasse that specialized in modern art. As the Secession’s business managers, the Cassirers built a new gallery in 1899 that displayed works by the Berlin group and other leading modernists.

Official Berlin responded predictably to the dissidents’ initiative. The kaiser ordered military officers not to attend Secession exhibitions in uniform. He also barred Secession members from serving on juries of the official salon. In alliance with the Association of German Artists, Wilhelm managed to exclude the Secession from Germany’s exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. When the Cultural Ministry tried to make peace with the Secession by proposing a retrospective show for Liebermann in the Royal Academy’s new quarters, the kaiser vetoed the idea. The painter, he said, was “poisoning the soul of the German nation.”

Preparations for the Berlin Secession exhibition in 1904. Members of the exhibition committee (from left to tight): Willy Do’ring, Bruno Cassirer, Otto Engel, Max Liebermann, Walter Leistifow, Kurt Herrmann, Fritz Klimsch

Fortunately for the fate of modern art in Germany, such measures did not prevent the Secession from becoming a viable enterprise, one that helped to make the unorthodox and the innovative more culturally acceptable. As Liebermann himself boasted in 1907: “Yesterday’s revolutionaries have become today’s classics.”