Lovis Corinth

Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth — known as Lovis Corinth — was born on 21 July 1858 in Tapiau, East Prussia, the city now called Gvardeysk in present-day Russia. He received his formal training at the Königsberg Academy of Arts and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, before travelling to Paris to study under William-Adolphe Bouguereau. These successive apprenticeships shaped a painter of exceptional range, and Corinth went on to become one of the defining figures of the Berlin Secession, working across painting, printmaking, and drawing until his death on 17 July 1925 in Zandvoort, Netherlands.

Corinth's output moved through several distinct phases, each marked by an unflinching engagement with the physical world. His early canvases, such as Butcher Shop of 1897, brought a Naturalist directness to scenes that most contemporaries would have considered beneath the dignity of serious painting, treating slaughterhouse interiors with the gravity of history painting. His portraiture was equally unsparing: Self-Portrait with Skeleton of 1896 places the artist alongside a human skeleton in a confrontation with mortality that aligns his sensibility with the existential currents of the fin de siècle. Religious subjects, too, received this treatment — Under the Cross of 1909 fuses Impressionist surface with an emotional intensity that anticipates Expressionism. A stroke in 1911 altered but did not diminish his powers; the Self-Portrait in a White Smock of 1918 channels physical frailty into vigorous, psychologically charged brushwork. His late Walchensee landscapes, culminating in the 1924 canvas of that name, are now widely regarded as the summit of his achievement — shimmering, agitated works that secured his place in the history of German landscape painting. Der Eichbaum, painted in 1913 and held at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and The New Pond in the Tiergarten, Berlin of 1908 further demonstrate the breadth of his landscape practice.

Corinth's institutional presence remains substantial. The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin holds more than twenty of his oil paintings, and works are held at the Belvedere in Vienna and The National Gallery in London. In 2025, the centenary of his death prompted a major exhibition — In Sight! Lovis Corinth, the Nationalgalerie, and the Degenerate Art Campaign — at the Alte Nationalgalerie, drawing critical attention from Apollo Magazine, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Berliner Zeitung, and other publications to the Nazi-era confiscation of his work and its subsequent vindication. Further solo presentations have been mounted at the Belvedere in Vienna in 2021, at Galerie Karsten Greve in Paris and Cologne in 2022, at Galerie Karsten Greve AG in St. Moritz in 2023, at the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg in 2025, and at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin in 2026. In the secondary market, his work is handled by Galerie Karsten Greve across its Cologne, Paris, and St. Moritz locations, as well as by Galerie Ludorff in Düsseldorf and Daxer & Marschall Kunsthandel in Munich.