MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Lovis Corinth (21 July 1858 – 17 July 1925) was a German artist and writer, whose paintings were a bridge between the styles of impressionism and expressionism, creating portraits and landscapes of great vitality. It was after suffering a stroke in 1911, becoming partially paralysed on his left side, that his work took on a looser, more expressionist quality. An influential painter and thinker, he was President of the Berlin Secession from 1915 – 1925. During the Third Reich, Corinth's work was condemned by the regime as ‘degenerate’, and in 1937, the Nazis removed almost 300 of his works from public collections, and exhibited seven of them in the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937. This portrait is of his friend, the Danish critic Georg Brandes, who was born into a non-observant Jewish family in Copenhagen. Brandes was not fond of his portrait however, and upon learning of Corinth’s death, he wrote in a letter to his secretary that it was Corinth's “punishment for such a wretched portrait of myself”.