Lesser Ury

Leo Lesser Ury was a 19th to 20th century German artist who painted in the style of German Impressionism. He had also trained as a printmaker and he made both black-and-white and colored lithographs. He followed the Dusseldorf school of painting after joining the Kunstakademie in 1879, when he was 18 years old.

His father was a baker who passed away in 1872, and because of his death the Ury family moved to Berlin from Birnbaum. Ury left off his schooling in Berlin when he was 17, in order to enter into an apprenticeship and learn a trade, but he also enrolled in the Kunstakademie the next year. He spent the next decade travelling to other cities in Europe, particularly Paris, Brussels, Stuttgart and Munich. He took classes at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Munich before returning to settle down in Berlin in 1887 once more.

When he had returned to Berlin he was a mature artist, confident in the style of Impressionism. Unfortunately his paintings were not readily accepted by the Berlin Akademie, and when he exhibited for the first time with them he was greeted with a certain amount of hostility. One opinion is that the newly formed German Reich had caused a certain amount of anti-semitism against the Jews, of which Ury was one, and also for the fact that he’d brought back a popular art movement form from France, too soon after the Franco-Prussian War. Only with the support of a respected German artist, Adolph von Menzel, was Ury’s work awarded a prize at the event.

The resistance to his works made it very hard for Ury to make a living from his paintings at the official exhibitions, so in 1893 he joined one of the artist groups that was rebelling against the traditional school of art. The name of that group was the Munich Secession; it had recently formed in 1892 as a refuge for progressive artists who wanted to freely exhibit their new modernist works. The Berlin Secession was also initiated in 1892, and when Ury returned to Berlin in 1901 he would eventually exhibit with them also.

It’s believed that he was deliberately kept on the outside of the Berlin Secession artists, which included Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann, because his work was not quite sympathetic with theirs. Lieberman, particularly, was supposedly responsible for keeping Ury, who was already a loner and working independently of the movement, separate for many years. Actually, Ury waited more than a decade to participate with them, as his first exhibition with the Munich Secession came in 1915. Subsequently he held an even more successful major exhibition with them in 1922.

Ury became well recognized for both his oil paintings and his pastels. His Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes (rural and urban) and interiors were in demand by that time. Most popular were his rainy streets, night-time cafe and coffee house scenes, and he was skillful in painting still lifes as well. His compositions ranged from darkened rooms to brilliant sunny skies. Ury’s main mistake, although he may not have realized it then, was that he turned out copies of his more popular works too quickly, compromising their quality. He did retain the originals, but his reputation was soon damaged by the inferior reproductions.

After he had grown elderly Ury generally withdrew himself from the public, but he did like to travel. He went to London in the mid-1920s and then later on to Paris in 1928, and he did bring back some paintings that he’d made while visiting there. Some of his best paintings are listed here as: Hochbahnhof Bülowstraße (1922); Vor dem Café" (Berlin bei Nacht) (1920s); Charing Cross, London (1926); Waterloo Bridge in the Sun. His still life paintings include Amaryllis; Fruit Still Life on a White Blanket; and Blooms.

Lesser Ury died in Berlin shortly before his 70th birthday. The Berlin National Gallery and the Secession had planned to hold a retrospective exhibit on his birthday in honor of his life and his works, but he died before it could occur. The rise to power by the German Nazis, shortly after Ury’s death in 1931, can be blamed for the suppression of his life’s work, which had included several pieces about the Jewish culture. For several decades after his death he was forgotten, but today his works are sought after for private collections and can be found in several national museums.