Ernst Liebermann, Junges Mädchen

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‘Junges Mädchen’ (‘Young Girl’)
Biography: Ernst Liebermann

‘Healthy Aryan flesh’
‘There were the sensual and lingering nudes of Karl Truppe, Gerhardinger, Graf, Ernst Liebermann, Johann Kluska, Schult, Richard Klein, and many others furnushed the exhibition with ‘healthy Aryan flesh’ (Peter Adam, ‘Art of the Third Reich’).

Nudes and half nudes
From year to year akts (nudes) gained popularity in National Socialist art, both in painting and sculpture. Finally about a tenth of the GDK-paintings shown were nudes. The increasing number of nudes was a reflection of the new feeling of the human body. Nudes were part of the Nature culture. The demand for naturalness, vitality, and sensualism found its visual counterpart in the presentation of the naked body. Here too it was antiquity, the Renaissance, and the old Masters that provided the models: the nudes of Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Rubens, and Rembrandt. The nudes of the Impressionists, especially Edouard Manet’s Olympia, were rejected as a mere experience of the eye, the body painted for its own sake, the carrier of colours. They were not the expression of a moral, sociological, and religious attitude, which determined the nudes of the Third Reich. The presentation of the devil woman, the prostitute, as modern artists often depicted her, was not only unthinkable but was considered an insult to German womanhood. If man was shown as the dominator of Nature, woman was represented as Nature herself. She was the beauty of Nature, or the playfulness of Nature, and of course was as fertile as Nature. She was shown over and over again in a state of ripeness.

Women were described with soft lines and gentle contours, the image of devotion and cooperation. They were an object; their role was subservient, to be looked at, to be fertilised. Her own sexuality was minimised. She was usually seen facing forward, without pubic hair. In the past, nudes often cowered, hiding their breasts. The new woman, as in Ivo Saliger’s Diana’s Rest, stood upright, proudly displaying her naked body to the viewer, who, in certain pictures, was also the male judge of its attractions, as in Adolf Ziegler’s Judgment of Paris. (source: Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich).

Several halfnudes of Liebermann were displayed at the Great German Art Exhibition.

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