The Petersen Portrait

In 1891 the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark, commissioned the artist Max Liebermann to paint a portrait of the city’s burgomaster, Carl Petersen. This article considers the scandal that ensued when the portrait was rejected by Petersen and his supporters in the Senate and among Hamburg’s grand bourgeoisie. What Petersen found offensive in the portrait was Liebermann’s unsentimental portrayal of a leading political figure; to Petersen and his supporters the portrait made him look common, as though he were an old worker, rather than a dignified bourgeois gentleman. The artist used the hated plein-air technique of painting — impressionist brushwork, lighter colour, lack of detail—thought to be an ugly, experimental approach to portraiture, and one that slandered the man who was the subject. Petersen wanted a formal portrait to memorialize his service to the city, capture his dignity, and make him look regal in his senatorial costume. He could not see such a pictorial tribute in Liebermann’s work. In analysing this rejection of Liebermann’s art, the author argues that Petersen’s cultural antimodernism was representative of the regressive political outlook of Hamburg’s patrician class, and thus of the liberal elite’s unwillingness to address the city’s rapidly changing social and economic character after 1871. Furthermore, the scandal over the portrait — a portrait that Lichtwark had hoped would inaugurate a new tradition of modern German portraiture — constituted a serious setback to Lichtwark’s ambitious plans for a collection of modern German art in the Kunsthalle. This specific incident, then, helps to illuminate the nature of the conflict over modernism in Imperial Germany, and highlights public resistance to modern art as monument in the 1890s

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