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Technological University Dublin
CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language
Genre Painting; Visual Culture; National Identity; Arbeiterkultur; Bildung; Volkstracht; Heimatkunst; Realism in Art; Social Democratic Party (SPD); Friedrich von Schiller
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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Kunst Fürs Volk: Genre Painting As Mass Culture In Nineteenth-Century Germany, Colleen Becker
Kunst Fürs Volk: Genre Painting As Mass Culture In Nineteenth-Century Germany, Colleen Becker
CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language
Kunst fürs Volk repositions genre painting in nineteenth-century Germany as a form of mass culture, rather than high art, to achieve new insight into the form and function of a rather tired pictorial format. Genre paintings were as commonplace at galleries and large-scale art exhibitions as they were in commercial art, and they were used to illustrate all manner of objects and ephemera. The reiteration of forms within genre paintings had become, in a sense, a ‘massification’ of artistic technique and expression, just as the images and figurative elements themselves were repeated endlessly within different media formats. To the extent …