In the Studio

The Met has always acquired and displayed paintings by living artists. This studio scene entered the collection in 1916 while the artist was still practicing in Germany, where he was part of the Munich Succession, a group that broke with the city’s traditional art academy. Habermann made daring compositional decisions, such as hiding the artist’s face and creating a strong diagonal across the square format that leaves the foreground empty apart from the loosely painted dish. This object’s large scale plunges the model into the distance. A flurry of unfinished forms and bare canvas along the composition’s right side evoke the studio’s accumulation of tools and props as well as the activity of the painter behind the easel.