Walter Leistikow, who played a major role in setting the stage for the advent of modernism in Berlin, is widely recognized as one of the most defining artists of the turn of the century. In 1883, at the age of 17, he left his home town of Bromberg, West Prussia, to attend the Berlin Academy. In his biography of the artist, which was published two years after Leistikow's death, Lovis Corinth, with whom Leistikow formed a close friendship after some initial animosity, wrote that his friend was dismissed from the Academy after six months due to his “lack of talent” (The Life of Walter Leistikow. A Piece of Berlin’s Cultural History, Berlin: Cassirer 1910). No doubt, this was the kind of anti-academic seal of approval that typified the advent of modernist movements around the year 1900. Leistikow finally approached the private studio of Hans Gude, a Norwegian landscape painter of the Düsseldorf School. His first motifs, which he found in the Berlin countryside and his native Pomerania, are entirely rooted in an understated, sincere realism that nevertheless exhibits hints of the delicately tinged color atmosphere of the later Symbolist period. In 1892, Leistikow was among the co-founders of the “Vereinigung der XI” (Association of the XI) group, named simply after the number of its members. Foregoing a mandatory artistic program, the group demanded fundamental changes concerning the selection criteria dictated by jury decisions at exhibitions. A decade later, in 1903, Leistikow and Harry Graf Kessler were involved in the establishment of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (German Artists’ Association) in Weimar. [KT]