Vader en kinderen houden een sneeuwbalgevecht 1913 - 1970

Curator: Gosh, just looking at this makes my face ache from the cold. It's called "Vader en kinderen houden een sneeuwbalgevecht" – "Father and children having a snowball fight" – a drawing, most likely from sometime between 1913 and 1970, by Hans Borrebach. All that lovely ink work—it looks like a family on the cusp of chaos, maybe in the Netherlands or somewhere northern Europe? Editor: It's a powerful image that conjures a very particular time. This drawing strikes me as quite performative, even unsettling. There's the father, front and center, pipe in mouth, seemingly directing this...carefully staged moment of familial "joy." Notice the slightly unsettling smiles and postures. The composition is loaded with power dynamics. Curator: Directing chaos! Yes, that’s what being a dad often felt like. I love how he captures movement, though. Like a rapid sequence comic strip, all these trajectories frozen at once. The artist uses that sharp, graphic style to convey a kind of frantic, childlike energy – even though it also feels staged, to some degree, for us to witness. The snow really comes alive, doesn’t it, almost sparkling despite the greyscale? Editor: Indeed. While that charming aesthetic cannot be denied, perhaps the staged appearance of joy also speaks to prescribed gender roles during that period. Father presides—pipe in mouth—as the children dutifully participate in what looks more like a performance than genuine play. Curator: Oh, I like that tension, reading it against the social roles… It definitely lifts it beyond simple nostalgia. It speaks about those unacknowledged tensions in the domestic sphere. So, there is warmth but with a sort of brittle, posed quality about it. Like they all understand they are ‘performing’ family in the way society expects from them. Editor: Precisely. It’s as if Borrebach provides us with a space to interrogate the complex, sometimes fraught, nature of familial bliss—highlighting the implicit performances woven into domestic life and gendered behaviours within family. It's that unease makes this drawing more powerful. Curator: I agree. Now that you mention this point, I see something quite unsettling underneath the "sweet" moment. It makes you think and feel at once. The stark contrasts amplify the scene's underlying anxiety, maybe the societal expectations simmering under all that snow! It leaves you cold despite it all. Editor: An experience leaving the viewer unsettled—a reminder that beneath the surface of any representation of happiness lies power dynamics, social constructs, and hidden performances we still unpack.