URY, Lesser

German painter. He was highly regarded at the time of his death, but is now largely forgotten except for his impressionistic scenes of Berlin life.

Born in Birnbaum, Poznan (then part of Prussia), he moved after the death of his father and during his teens to Berlin. In 1878 he began his art studies in Dusseldorf, spent time in Paris and Brussels, moved around the German cities of Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, before finally returning to Berlin in 1887.

As a mature painter he introduced Impressionism into the Berlin art scene, but not to popular acclaim. As a Jew, he was subject to the rampant anti-semitism of the newly established German Reich and as an importer of a foreign French art movement, he was subject to a strong nationalist condemnation engendered by the recent Franco-Prussian War. He remained an outsider in the Berlin art scene for most of his life but finally did achieve recognition in the years immediately prior to his death in 1931 - with a number of prominent exhibits and acceptance into the Berlin Secession.

Ury travelled to London, Paris and different German cities for several times and brought along with him an abundance of new pictures from each journey. The condition of the artist’s health worsened continually because of a heart attack shortly after a Paris trip in 1928. Ury died in his Berlin studio three weeks before his 70th birthday, when the Nationalgalerie and Secession wanted to honour his life’s work.

While known primarily as an Impressionist, his later art was Post-Impressionistic with the same interests and colour sense to be found in early van Gogh and Picasso. Moreover, he produced a number of important pieces with Jewish themes, for which reason he was included in a historic exhibition of Jewish artists curated by Martin Buber for the 5th Zionist Congress in 1901.

Shortly after Ury’s death in 1931, the Nazi’s ascended to power and systematically attempted to remove the art and reputations of Ury and other Jewish artists from European culture. In Ury’s case, they were largely successful and his work is barely known today.

The first ten years following the founding of the Berlin Secession in 1899 may be considered the heyday of German Impressionism. In addition to works by Liebermann, Corinth, and Slevogt, Important works included major works of minor artists, many of them have been unjustly forgotten. One of these minor artists was Lesser Ury, whose paintings of streets wet after rain had made his name.

Lesser Ury based nearly his entire oeuvre on views of Berlin, flashing its traditionally lively nightlife on canvas. Ury’s Berlin Street Scene not only points to German painters’ proximity to Paris, but to their new interest in the rediscovered arts of Baroque Spain and Goya, both so striking for their eloquent blacks and dramatically reduced palettes.

Berlin Street Scene (Leipzigerstrasse)