Family Portrait

France Kralj’s portrait of his wife, child and himself (leaving his studio after finishing work) is considered one of the highlights of New Objectivity in Slovenia. Some art historians even call it its quintessentially programmatic artwork. Two aspects stand out: first, this scene from the artist’s private or intimate life, actually a rarity in Kralj’s oeuvre, is devoid of any obvious or expected visual traits of intimacy (warmth, emotional depth or even sentimentality, etc.); second, this family portrait is actually a portrait of the painter as a sculptor. We see the artist’s finished work in front of us: not just the painting itself, but the (painted) sculpture of his wife and child in the foreground. This makes it easy to grasp New Objectivity’s emphasis on the concreteness or the world of objects as such, far removed from any symbolic depth.