Child from the Old Town

In the 1920s and early 1930s, German artists with a range of stylistic approaches foregrounded class struggle and the material and cultural circumstances of workers’ lives. Thoms was asso-ciated primarily with the city of Hannover and its contribution to the period’s post-expressionist movement known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). In response to his first solo exhibition in 1926, a critic described Thoms as “one of those modern artists who came back from abstraction to an almost fanatic representation of reality.” This 1925 portrait of a young girl exemplifies Thoms’s interest in the lives of ordinary people. Its title describes the sitter generically as an inhabitant of a city center—areas that at the time were often plagued by housing instability and a lack of fresh green spaces for working-class families. The child’s melancholic gaze dominates the canvas; behind her is a thinly sketched urban setting. In dialogue with Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, Thoms’s painting offers—with its similar mask-like countenance—a different view of class from the same historical moment.