In November 1892, a scandal occurred when an Edvard Munch exhibition was closed by a majority of the members of the Association of Berlin Artists.

Later, in 1898, the jury of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition rejected a landscape painting by the painter Walter Leistikow.

[5] The president at the time, Max Liebermann, gave some demands by the Secession at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1899.

[6] Liebermann recruited the art dealers Bruno and Paul Cassirer and offered them to become executive secretaries of the Secession.

This thinking lined up incredibly well with the wants of the Berlin Secession modernists, and made the split an easy transition for politics.

The event was attended by those of high social standing as well- the audience not only contained the head of the salon, Max Koner, but the President of the Royal Academy, which helped it be perceived as a surprisingly respectable gathering.

When Germany wanted to participate with art in the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, failed to reach an agreement of the commission to Anton von Werner and the Emperor with the Berlin Secession.

Jury members this year were Heinrich Reifferscheid, Philipp Franck, Leo von König, Lovis Corinth and Ernst Oppler.

Among the visitors were Max Slevogt, Georg Kolbe, Fritz Klimsch and Ernst Oppler, as well as representatives of the press.

A member of the Berlin Secession, Karl Scheffler, categorized the differences in the artistic styles, perception and conception.

Many important artists were active or joined, in 1906 it was August Kraus, in 1907 it was Max Beckmann, Bernhard Pankok, Hans Purrmann, and Emil Rudolf Weiß, 1908 Ernst Barlach, Wassily Kandinsky and Emil Orlík, 1909 Lyonel Feininger, 1910 Rudolf Grossmann and 1911 Hans Meid.

There was still criticism from conservative circles, who consider the Berlin impressionism as decadent and a threat to German art, such as the nationalist Werdandi-Bund.

On the initiative of Georg Tappert, Heinrich Richter-Berlin and others, including Otto Mueller and Max Pechstein, through whom the Dresdner Künstlergruppe Brücke was added, formed a new group, the Neue Secession.

Numerous artists were dependent on the sales of the art dealers Bruno and Paul Cassirer, sometimes even denied their livelihood through this way.

In fact, the depicted persons Hermann Struck, Emil Pottner, Ernst Bischoff-Culm, Max Neumann and Herstein, along with Corinth, were the members who remained loyal to the Secession.

Oppler did not resign from the Secession but renounced in the future to participate in the annual exhibitions of the increasingly Expressionist Berlin Secessionists.

The power in the Secession was the fact that it allowed multiple styles to exist in the same space- unlike the academy, which demanded only one to be adhered to.

Nonetheless, he constantly attempted to interfere with matters like the jury of the salon, which caused conflicts in the art community.

The cultural policy during the period of National Socialism led to a lasting damage that made the once influential artists' association meaningless.

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists in February 1933, a new board was elected, which included, among others, Max Pechstein, Eugene Spiro, Magnus Zeller, Hans Purrmann, Bruno Krauskopf and Rudolf Belling.

At an important meeting on April 25, 1933, Pechstein read a statement to the government in which the Berlin Secession undertook to help build the new Germany.

Emil van Hauth, a member of the Secession since 1932, read a program he had designed that was in the spirit of the National Socialist Kampfbund.

[20] Subsequently, the statutes were changed, and on May 2, Emil van Hauth, Artur Degener and Philipp Harth were elected to the new board.

At a meeting in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, as it later turned out, van Hauth vilified the Secession as an assembly with a Marxist attitude and wanted to achieve dissolution.

At a further appointment in the Ministry of Culture, the board member Adolf Strübe managed to convince the responsible speaker that there had never been anti-state or political tendencies on the part of the artist community and that the association was loyal to the Hitler government.

The Berlin Secession opened cultural, political, and class doors that paved the way for Germany to have, briefly, a spot in the artistic limelight before WWII.

Many of the patrons and artists were of wealthy Jewish descent, and while they were specifically targeted during WWII, the ideas they shared during the Secession have survived long after.