Genre art

A genre painting (French, to Latin: genus, kind ', ' gender '; obsolete: genre picture, in accordance with customs painting on the term genre painting ) is the painted illustration of an everyday scene - for example, groups of people, scenes and actions - as a depiction of forms of life of a people and its scenic surroundings.

Sometimes the transition to landscape painting is fluid, particularly in the Romantic era.

History

Precursor of this painting were particular genre scenes of the monthly pictures, especially in the Flemish Books of Hours of the 15th century. But even the old masters such as Pieter and Jan Bruegel the Elder. and Lucas van Leyden created in the 16th century with the typical paintings of peasants and family scenes. The focus was on the representation of dramatic negative examples of human behaviors such as drunkenness, strife or pandering. At its peak the genre for a decisive shift to a reflection of the values ​​gehobenerer population in the Dutch painting of the 17th century. The moral appeals reveal themselves to the viewer since then only a hidden meaning. At this time he also wrote his genre paintings of Jan Vermeer.

Substantive interpretation

Earlier research approaches interpreted the representations of the so-called Gouden eeuw often as snapshots of everyday life, which they attached to the value of a cultural and historical testimony. Since the 1970s, however, managed increasingly to decrypt the iconographic context. It became clear that the genre pictures Although exemplary play an everyday scene, behind which almost always conceals a deeper statement. Thus, they are in the sense of popular imagery of the Baroque usually as allegories, some with complex ambiguous statements to conceive.

Many alleged everyday scenes have their basis rather popular comic plays and proverbs and are thus often - if not always - narrative character. An Italian genre painters, the Neapolitans Gaspare Traversi, created his images, for example, parallel to the development and heyday of the " opera buffa napolitana " around the middle of the 18th century, in the everyday life of the lower social strata was abandoned by revealing situations of ridicule. Thus, a moral message was sent to the audience. Most genre paintings also have a didactic relevance, because they have a strong moral content. The representation of negative behaviors should discourage this and encourage them to improve their behavior and positive examples should give the viewer an incentive to mimic. Of course, the images can also visually entertaining value can not be denied. Because of the inherent didactic - moralizing pictures interpretive approaches their owners were able thus to emphasize their cultural background. The client for this type of art, therefore, came exclusively from the civil - secular milieu.

Social Realism

In the first half of the 19th century ( Biedermeier ) the genre picture lives as a "social trend picture" again, especially by the Düsseldorf school of painting, especially in the context of a greater interest to realism, such as Johann Peter Hasenclever. Genre painting is to be regarded as a pioneer of modern art movements such as impressionism. A rapidly growing number of art-interested buyers mainly from middle-class households fulfilled the desire for one's own work of art on the wall. Especially the came into fashion in the wake of increasing travel activity peasant country life was represented on medium-sized formats, also in the U.S. like hotcakes. In art cities such as Berlin, Dusseldorf and Munich, painters gathered in large numbers from all over Europe to make the genre their livelihood. Among the most famous genre painters, whose works also found in monthly magazines dissemination, included representatives of the Munich school as Franz Defregger, Rudolf Epp and Hermann von Kaulbach.