ABSTRACT
The work of Lovis Corinth, though it belongs to an earlier period than that of the artists who endured at first-hand the wave of political repression and historical revisionism, has suffered nevertheless from its critical effects. His brilliant and copious oeuvre, far from being in any sense an aesthetic byway or a sport of history, takes its place with ease and authority in the mainstream of Western painting. Corinth was not himself an Expressionist, but Expressionism—the most important movement in modern German art—forms the aesthetic link that binds artists to his achievement. Corinth's lifetime coincided with the last period in which the official art academies of the great European capitals still had reason to regard themselves, even if mistakenly, as the sanctioned custodians of tradition. Corinth's earlier pictures closely conform to the Leibl-esque spirit. Corinth occupies, in the history of German art, a place comparable to that of Cezanne and Rodin in French art.
