COLOGNE.- With the three-part exhibition cycle August Sander. Architecture, Landscape, Portrait. Facets of an Œuvre, the gallery is honouring two major anniversaries: firstly, the photographer would have turned 150 on 17 November this year; and secondly, next year marks the 100th anniversary of the solo exhibition at the Klnischer Kunstverein in 1927, where he first presented the broad outlines of his epoch-making work People of the 20th Century. Sander’s significance as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century is founded on this conceptually structured opus magnum, which was based on the intention to comprehensively depict the structure of the society of his time through numerous individual and group portraits. Yet it was by no means solely in the genre of portraiture that he proved himself a master of his medium. Sander not only pursued architectural and landscape photography with great intensity, but in the latter field he created images that "certainly rank among the masterpieces of the landscape genre in 20th-century photography" (Olivier Lugon). These form the opening instalment of our exhibition series, which aims to broaden the perspective to encompass the photographer’s entire body of work: The landscape images will be followed early next year by his architectural photographs, before, in spring 2027 – coinciding with the major Sander exhibition at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig – selections from his portrait work are shown, including his best-known portraits as well as rarely seen images.
Art-historical research has long assumed that August Sander only turned to the 'more innocuous' subject of landscape in the anti-avant-garde climate of the Third Reich, after the printing block for his portrait book Antlitz der Zeit had been confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1936. However, as the scholarly catalogueing of his archive has made clear, the latter played a role in his work from the very beginning and throughout his career. Indeed, even more than that: in an account by Sander from the early 1950s, in which he recalled his personal discovery of photography during his time as a young lad working in the spoil heaps at one of the mines near his parents’ home in Herdorf, it appears, as it were, as the initial spark for his later professional career: "Once we had reached the top [...] the camera was set up. It was here that, for the very first time in my life, I had the opportunity to look through the viewfinder. I was so amazed by the beauty of the landscape, [...] the sky covered with absolutely magnificent clouds; on top of that, the movement of the people, the landscape and the railway became visible [...]. From that moment on, my enthusiasm for photography grew, and it has never left me to this day." In this recollection, his first encounter with the camera is inextricably linked to the beauty of the landscape.
The notion that August Sander, by turning to landscape photography during the Nazi era, had embarked on a kind of 'inner emigration' – as his son Gunther once put it – is refuted simply by the fact that numerous landscapes can already be found in his early work. The start of our exhibition is thus marked by one such early gum print by the photographer, in a representative large format and stylistically entirely in keeping with the Pictorialist movement of the time. It was taken in the early years of the 20th century, when Sander ran a studio in Linz, Austria. After moving to Cologne in 1910, he used the image – quite surprisingly for a portrait photographer – as the header on the letterhead for his newly established studio on Drener Strae in Lindenthal.
The second half of the 1920s was almost entirely taken up with work on People of the 20th Century. In 1931, at a time when August Sander was increasingly turning his attention to the landscape, he noted: "Having thus depicted the physiognomy of people, we now turn to their creations—that is, the works of humankind—beginning with the landscape. Man also leaves his mark on the landscape through his works, so that it, too, develops out of necessity, just like language; in doing so, he often alters what has come into being biologically. In the landscape, too, we recognise the human spirit of its time, which we can capture through the photographic apparatus. […] The landscape, defined by a shared language, conveys the physiognomic portrait of a nation’s era."
Accordingly, his depictions of different regions, just like his portrait work, can be understood as parts of a common, overarching concept of the systematic representation of an era. Much as with his project People of the 20th Century, his approach to landscape photography was also characterised by a typological thinking: he always worked in series in order to document various regions as comprehensively as possible – ranging from individual botanical studies or close-up shots of rock strata to panoramic photographs taken from an elevated vantage point. He then organised these series into eight regional groups: the Siebengebirge, the Middle Rhine, the Lower Rhine, the Westerwald, the Eifel, the Moselle, Westphalia and the Bergisches Land.
What is surprising is that, despite all the sharpness and attention to detail, the photographer’s style is by no means always strictly factual or documentary: One of the most impressive and widely published photographs, The Siebengebirge: View from the Rolandsbogen, captivates with the soft light that, as the sun sets low in the sky, gently illuminates the hills of the mountain range and casts the valleys into dark shadows, whilst the sky above is streaked with shifting cloud formations. In some images, ships on the Rhine or rows of trees, which Sander photographed against the light, stand out dramatically as black silhouettes; in others, nature is bathed in rising mists. One of the leading figures of New Objectivity photography appears here as a romantic at the same time – it is this combination of two opposites that constitutes the special, distinctive charm of many of August Sander’s visually striking landscape photographs.
When, at the suggestion of L. Fritz Gruber, he organised his first solo exhibition after the war in 1951 as part of photokina, Sander included landscape photography on an equal footing: on three walls he displayed his series Cologne as it was as well as fourteen large-format Rhenish Landscape Studies; only the third wall was reserved for portraiture. Even though he never developed his landscape photographs into a project anywhere near as extensive as People of the 20th Century – a concept, moreover, which he could not complete in his lifetime – this once again demonstrates the importance Sander himself attached to his landscape photographs.
The vast majority of the works on display in the current exhibition are also Rhineland landscapes, primarily photographs of the Siebengebirge, a region Sander held in such high regard and visited frequently. Edged in black ink, mounted on original card and signed there, Sander compiled these images into portfolios as early as the 1930s. In contrast to the photographs in his portrait work—which would later become the sole focus of art-historical research on Sander as well as the art market—many of these subjects exist exclusively as vintage prints. The only exception is a set of twelve photographs for a portfolio that Gunther Sander compiled for the first landscape exhibition in 1974.The images now on display are consequently of exceptional rarity.
