Modern Group Portraits in New York Exile: Community and Belonging in the Work of Arthur Kaufmann and Hermann Landshoff

Abstract

In the period 1933–1945 the group portrait was an important genre of art in exile, which has so far received little attention in research.[1] Individual works, such as Max Beckmann’s group portrait Les Artistes mit Gemüse, painted in 1943 in exile in Amsterdam,[2] were indeed in the focus. Until now, however, there has been no systematic investigation of group portraits in artistic exile during the Nazi era. The following observations are intended as a starting point for further investigations, and concentrate on the exile in New York and the work of the emigrated painter Arthur Kaufmann and photographer Hermann Landshoff in the late 1930s and 1940s, who devoted themselves to the genre of group portraits.