Families in Oil: Heritage and Collectivity in Paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit

Joe Bucciero, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University

The family portrait was central to German painting from the Middle Ages through the Biedermeier period. By the late 19th century, however, owing in part to the rise of photography, the genre mostly receded from view. Yet it returned, in a sense, near the end of Germany’s so-called Golden Twenties, when numerous family portraits appeared in step with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. This lecture will explore why—and to what extent—the family portrait reemerged during this period of political and cultural upheaval, and what it might have signified in the context of the changing social landscape of the late 1920s and early 1930s.