Vortrag // Dominik Brabant, München: Genremalerei als Vorgeschichte der Soziologie? Überlegungen zur Neuperspektivierung von Gattungsgeschichte

In the organizer's words:

Early art historians from the 19th century onwards valued genre scenes above all for their supposed realism and anecdotal depiction of everyday scenes from past eras. Since around the 1970s, iconography and iconology have analyzed the motifs of this genre in terms of coded messages that often conveyed moral implications for the audience. The social history of art, on the other hand, saw genre painting primarily as a pictorial indicator of overarching social developments.
At present, however, the question is increasingly being raised as to how the emergence, development and dissolution of boundaries of this pictorial genre and of the genre structure as a whole could be understood in the field of tension between genre-poetic and genre-external factors. Using the example of a series of genre scenes from various centuries and the associated art theoretical and historical debates, the lecture would like to propose that genre painting should be understood as an 'experimental system' of pre-sociological thought. In this, artists (and a few female artists) have explored the potential to make the human being visible as a being that is always already integrated in social constellations and intersubjective relationships. Against this background, genre painting should be understood as a painted sociology before the invention of this discipline in the 19th century.

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PARTICIPATION:
Participation is free of charge. The lecture will bebroadcastin parallel via Zoom . Further information [here].