Bock:Humor im Bild bei Adolph Schroedte

The problem-oriented monograph focuses on the artist Adolph Schroedter, a central figure of the Düsseldorf School of Painting and a pioneer in the fields of genre painting, arabesque, and caricature, as a starting point for an analysis of humor in 19th-century art and its pivotal role between an idealistically and romantically shaped worldview and a reality that is opening up to new forms of realism. In an intellectualized bourgeois environment, he established the reputation of the artist as a "master of comedy and humor." This study addresses this humor in the sense of a historical understanding, tracing not only the discursive fields of aesthetic theory formation but also questioning the significance of this art for the contemporary reality of life, as well as the academic and institutional framework in which it developed and asserted its innovative potential. At the center is the analysis of the imagery itself, which opens up to the everyday and the small while also providing means for their reconciliation.