Max Jakob Friedländer

Max Jakob Friedländer ( born July 5, 1867 in Berlin, † October 11, 1958 in Amsterdam ) was a German art historian.

Life

Friedlander was born into a Jewish family of bankers and jewel merchants, but also decided lack of career prospect in the Prussian civil service first for the profession of a private scholar of art history. As he himself said, marked the close to museums already his childhood:

"I 'm away born in Berlin two hundred meters from the museum and remained seated twice at school, because I was staying extensively in the gallery. "

He studied in Munich, Florence and Leipzig, and in 1891, after only six semesters doctorate with a thesis on Albrecht Altdorfer.

As scientific volunteer began Friedlander for one year at Friedrich Lippmann am of Prints and Drawings in Berlin, where he probably Wilhelm von Bode met. He stayed out of interest for another year before in the Graphic Arts Collection of the Wallraf -Richartz-Museum, he worked from 1894 as an assistant Ludwig Scheiblerstrasse in Cologne.

With his return to Berlin, he was employed from 1896 to 1933 in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, from 1924 as the first director. From 1908 to 1930 he was also Director of Prints and Drawings. In 1933 he was dismissed as " non-Aryans ".

In 1939 he emigrated because of the increasing harassment as a Jew in the Netherlands. After the occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 Friedlander worked as an escaped Jew from Germany actually in great danger of being deported to an extermination camps in the East. On the other hand Friedlander was at the Occupying a sought-after expert, he was appreciated as a connoisseur of Early Netherlandish painting of the 15th and 16th centuries when the Nazis. Above all, Hermann Goering, who loved this painting especially, frequently made ​​use of his expertise. Therefore, he protected him from the onset soon in the Netherlands persecution of the Jews. So he kept Friedlander of arrest, deportation and subsequent murder ..

In 1953 he was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Publications (selection)

• Masterpieces of Dutch painting of the 15th and 16th century (1903 )
• The Antwerp Mannerist, 1520, In: Yearbook of the Royal Prussian Art Collections 36 (1915 ), pp. 65-91.
• From Jan van Eyck to Bruegel (1916 )
• The art connoisseur, publisher Bruno Cassirer, Berlin 1919.
• Albrecht Dürer. Insel Verlag, Berlin 1921
• The Dutch Mannerist. E. A. Seemann, Leipzig 1921 ( Library of the History of Art 3)
• Early Netherlandish painting, 14 volumes. Sijthoff Publishers, Leiden / Netherlands 1924-1937
• Real and unreal: From the experience of the connoisseur. Bruno Cassirer, Berlin 1929
• From the confines of the art science. A. A. M. Stools, The Hague, 1942. Illegal publication privately printed in the Netherlands.
• On art and connoisseurship. Translation by Tancred Borenius. Cassirer, London, 1942. Oprecht German in 1946
• From art and connoisseurship. Oprecht, Zurich 1946
• Essays on Landscape Painting and other genres. Stols, The Hague 1947