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Lovis Corinth
1886-1980
Lovis Corinth holds a position in German art history similar to that occupied by Edouard Manet in the history of French painting. Bridging the 19th and 20th centuries, Corinth had his feet in two worlds. He began as a fairly conventional (and highly successful) academic painter, but lived to participate in the birth of Expressionism. In his bold use of impasto and, most of all, his intensely personal approach to his subjects, Corinth is one of the most important precursors and pioneers of German modernism. Although he is revered in his native Germany, Corinth is less well known internationally, in part due to a paucity of major oil paintings on the international market. This lack, however, is amply compensated for by the ready availability of the artist's compelling works on paper.
Lovis Corinth was an unlikely artist. His birth, in 1858 in the East Prussian town of Tapiau, was inauspicious at best. Culture and refinement were unknown concepts in his family, which was dominated by his loutish and at times violent stepbrothers. (The artist's mother, thirteen years older than his father, had brought five adolescent sons to the marriage.) An indifferent student, Corinth first knew happiness when, in 1876, he convinced his father to let him leave highschool for the Königsberg Art Academy. Here he began some eleven years of artistic training, tracing a checkered path from Königsberg to Munich to Antwerp to Paris and back again, finally, to Munich and Königsberg. At the Académie Julian in Paris, facing nationalistic hostility from his French competitors, Corinth was granted admission to the prestigious Salon, but denied the "honorable mention" he so dearly coveted. Over the ensuing years, he gathered a small share of favorable reviews and awards (even, in 1890, an "honorable mention" in Paris), but he lived off the income from his family's property. Only in 1895, at the age of thirty-eight, did he sell his first painting.
Corinth, like many artists of his time, eventually came to earn a good living from his portraits, and his oeuvre included a broad range of subjects, from landscapes, nudes and still lifes to genre pieces. However, his schooling and subsequent professional experiences taught him to expect the most accolades for elaborate figural compositions depicting traditional religious, historical and literary themes. It was with such works that he gradually made his reputation, first in Munich and then in Berlin, where he moved in 1901 to seek his fortune with the recently founded Secession. Firmly rooted in the academic naturalism that constituted the core of Corinth's lengthy training, his paintings had a blowsy sensuality and a contemporary immediacy that some critics found disrespectful to the loftiness of their ostensible themes. Corinth's increasingly vigorous impasto -- influenced by French Impressionism -- equally placed him within the ranks of the current avant-garde, to the occasional disgruntlement of more conservative forces.
Chronology
1858 Born in Tapiau, East Prussia
1876-80 Attends Königsberg Academy
1880-86 Continues studies in Munich
1884-86 Travels to Antwerp and Paris
1887-91 Rejected by the Paris Salon; moves to Berlin
1891 Moves to Munich
1892 Founding member of Munich Secession
1900 Moves to Berlin; joins the Berlin Secession and opens a painting school for women
1903 Marries the artist Charlotte Berend
1911 Suffers a stroke
1919 Acquires a home on the Walchensee in Bavaria and thereafter alternates between here and Berlin
1925 Dies of pneumonia while visiting Zandvoort, Holland
works by Lovis Corinth
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