The Bucerius Art Forum in Hamburg is presenting a comprehensive exhibition titled "Children, Children! Between Representation and Reality," featuring 150 works spanning from the early Renaissance to contemporary times. The exhibition, curated by Katrin Dyballa, includes paintings, graphics, photographs, and sculptures depicting children by master artists including Titian, Anthonis van Dyck, Kokoschka, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Murillo, Böcklin, Runge, Joshua Reynolds, and Gerhard Richter.
The exhibition opens with a contemporary observation about how dogs have increasingly replaced children in many people's emotional lives, as illustrated by scenes of pet owners in parks calling their dogs with the same affection once reserved for children. This context makes the exhibition particularly relevant, as it brings children and childhood back into focus, presenting laughing and serious, mischievous and sad, playing and working children, and even those lying on their deathbeds.
The artworks are distributed across six thematic rooms, each exploring different aspects of childhood representation. These sections examine parent-child relationships, the social status of the portrayed subjects, assigned gender roles, children's living environments between playrooms and schools, and early death. By spanning from the early modern period to the present day, the exhibition reveals how much childhood "naturalness" is culturally constructed and how strongly adult artists' and patrons' views of children depend on historical circumstances, social position, and the political function of their representation.
The exhibition begins with pictorial family arrangements that serve as the thematic foundation of the show. The dominance of mother-child representations over father-child portrayals reflects not only typical family role distribution but also religious influence. Mary and Jesus, as the archetypal mother-child pair, continued to shape visual language even in the bourgeois milieu of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While the exhibition occasionally shows fathers in intimate connection with their children, when they appear in portraits, the gesture of distance usually prevails, with political-dynastic symbolism determining the composition.
In aristocratic portraits, daughters were depicted from early childhood as marriage candidates and collateral for future alliances, while sons were portrayed as guarantors of the house's continuation. A portrait by Titian shows the sword-girded Duke of Urbino looking proudly at the viewer while his small son gazes up at him. One of the child's hands reaches for his father's, while the other rests on armor standing beside him – armor he must grow into to fulfill his duties as heir and military successor.
The exhibition draws illuminating parallels between historical and modern representations. A 1963 photograph by Max Scheler shows Willy Brandt, then mayor of Berlin, walking with his two sons. He has placed his hand on the smaller boy's shoulder while the older one turns lively toward his father with a question or comment. However, Brandt gazes into the distance with statesmanlike absence, demonstrating how such father-son dynamics persist across centuries.
A dedicated section focuses on children from simple circumstances, though visitors don't necessarily see the harsh reality of their lives. The picturesquely ragged street boys in Murillo's paintings are cheerful little rascals, always ready for mischief – a romanticizing glorification of poverty that appealed to well-situated audiences across Europe and established its own subgenre. Similarly, children in a Sauerland rope manufactory, painted around 1795 by Johannes Herst, work well-fed and well-dressed in fresh air under blue skies spanning an idyllic, sun-drenched landscape.
Fritz von Uhde's painting "Courtyard in Zandvoort" (1903) compositionally inscribes a social boundary separating a dreary children's world from its carefree, wealthy surroundings. The left half of the painting shows two poorly dressed servant girls sitting against a gray house wall, knitting and sorting fruit, while the right half opens the view into a colorfully glowing, impressionistically shimmering garden with a group apparently enjoying themselves there.
Black-and-white photographs by Friedrich Seidenstücker, Aenne Biermann, and Herbert List capture snapshots of childhood where streets and backyards serve as playgrounds, showing urban children in the Weimar Republic and in the rubble landscapes of post-war Germany. These images provide authentic glimpses into working-class childhood experiences often romanticized in painted works.
Particularly moving and disturbing is the encounter with children's death portraits, which occupy their own dedicated room. This section likely feels most foreign to contemporary visitors. The images of children lying on deathbeds with closed eyes and folded hands directly contradict our need to remember the deceased through photos showing them in active, happy moments. These portraits of deceased children, sometimes framed by figures from Christian or mythological-ancient iconography, once again refute the long-held notion that children's deaths were mourned less in earlier times due to high child mortality rates.
The exhibition's contemporary relevance becomes clear when considering former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's famous statement: "People always have children!" This phrase, which described a given reality for most of the time period illustrated in the exhibition, has lost its validity. While the economic and social policy consequences of declining birth rates have gradually entered collective consciousness, society has not yet recognized what emotional and cultural wealth it loses when childhood abundance dries up.
The Bucerius Art Forum exhibition runs until April 6, 2026, offering visitors an opportunity to contemplate this cultural and emotional richness through centuries of artistic representation of childhood. The accompanying catalog is available for 39.90 euros, providing additional scholarly context for the 150 works spanning five centuries of changing perspectives on childhood, family relationships, and social structures as reflected through the eyes of major artists.
