Overview
Max J. Friedländer
(1867—1958)
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(b Berlin, 5 June 1867; d Amsterdam, 11 Oct. 1958).
German art historian. The successor to Wilhelm von Bode as director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, he enriched the collection particularly in his own field of Early Netherlandish painting. In 1934 he retired to Holland. His magnum opus is Die altniederländische Malerei (14 vols., 1924–37). In a prefatory note to the English translation (Early Netherlandish Painting, 16 vols., 1967–76) Erwin Panofsky described it as ‘one of the few uncontested masterpieces produced by our discipline’. Friedländer covered the same ground in a much briefer format in Die frühen niederländischen Maler von Van Eyck bis Bruegel (1916), translated as From Van Eyck to Bruegel (1956).
