Questions posed in a
two-artist exhibition at Tate Liverpool reflect back on our own politically
desperate era, often with eerie resonance.
Tim Keane
August Sander, “Turkish
Mousetrap Salesman” (1924-30, printed 1990), photograph, gelatin silver print
on paper, 260 x 191 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland.
Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
– August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2017)
LIVERPOOL — A stout, late
middle-aged man turns to face the camera. His warm, dark eyes suggest his
initial suspicion of the photographer’s intentions has diminished. His woolen
suit jacket and neatly wound scarf conceal round shoulders and a thick neck.
The man’s tired and scarred face reveals someone adept at surviving adverse
seasons. The fact that the photographer, August Sander, identifies him as
“Turkish Mousetrap Salesman” (c. 1924-30) is mostly extraneous.
In fact, there is a
discrepancy between the boundless singularity of each Sander portrait and the
narrow sociological label attached to it. His photo portraits are an extensive
first act in Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 at the Tate Liverpool,
which couples two of Germany’s most prolific 20th-century portraitists, Sander
and Otto Dix.
Sander developed his
aesthetic in the wake of the 19th-century pseudoscience of human physiognomy.
He reached his peak in the 1920s, amid the rise of the Nazi party and
cataclysmic racialism of The Third Reich, which was predicated on eugenics.
Somehow, though, the artist’s preoccupation with faces, bodies, and social
types does not come across as exploitive or repressive to his subjects. It is
hard to disagree with German intellectual (and Sander’s contemporary) Walter
Benjamin, who lauded Sander’s photography for its “tender empiricism.”
August Sander, “Secretary
at West German Radio in Cologne” (1931, printed 1992), photograph, gelatin
silver print on paper, 260 x 149 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries
of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK
Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS,
London 2017)
The nearly 150 photographs
featured in the Tate exhibition represent only a small portion of Sander’s
open-ended and incomplete project, titled People of the Twentieth Century.
Sander thought of portrait photography as “a mosaic that becomes synthesis only
when it is presented en masse” and he believed that by taking unsentimental
pictures across demographics, the camera can “fix the history of the world.”
That lifelong undertaking was first conceived in 1910 and its early results
were published in his book Faces of Our Time (1929).
Detached almost to the
point of appearing clinical, Sander’s photography offers no explicit critique
of Weimar Germany’s economic and sociopolitical climate or considerable class
divides. Yet, because he shed so much light on the physical toll paid by the
working class, farmers, minorities and displaced members of the upper class, he
is hardly a propagandist for capitalism’s status quo.
Born in 1876 into a
working-class Cologne family, Sander worked for a time as a miner. Following
his military service, he apprenticed as a photographer throughout Germany
before coming into his own with photography assignments in Linz, Austria, and
eventually opening a studio in Cologne. After serving in the medical corps
during the First World War, he departed from his Cologne studio and hit the
road on a bicycle to take local portraits in the rural regions outside his
native city and, later, in the nooks and crannies of urban spaces.
Sander favored large format
cameras that could replicate what he termed the “delicacy of the delineation”
in early daguerreotypes, over newer, compact technologies. Using mostly natural
lighting, his minimally staged shooting and documentarian ethos — epitomized by
a fully frontal approach with limited depth of field — reproduce their human
subjects squarely within their milieu.
August Sander, “August
Sander” (1925, printed 1990), photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, 258 x
195 mm, ARTIST ROOMS Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland.
Presented by Gerd Sander 2009 (© Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung
Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London
2017)
Sander’s photographs are
organized chronologically and surrounded with detailed timelines explaining the
political and economic fluctuations destabilizing a culturally vibrant and
diverse Germany. Details of Weimar Germany’s war debt, hyperinflation, mass
unemployment and ineffective domestic policies enrich the emotional impact of
Sander’s portraits of ordinary people. How many of Sander’s subjects intuited
the slow-burning political catastrophe? And who among these individuals was
complicit in that reactionary sway? Who survived it and who did not? These
questions reflect back on our own politically desperate era, often with eerie
resonance.
And, as in our uneasy
times, the material trappings of Sander’s world attest to the precariousness of
daily life. The haves and the have-nots seem equally vulnerable. “Beggar”
(1926) focuses on an elderly man’s quizzical gaze and serene dignity while
foregrounding the dispossessed man’s contiguous space: the sooty pavement on
which he sits; the iron gate looming behind him; and the brickwork pillars
boxing him in. The up-close, softly lit compositions produce an aura of
tranquility even in the midst of disconcerting situations, as with the burly
and legless “Disabled Ex-servicemen” (1928) in his wooden wheelchair, alone at
the foot of sidewalk steps, or in images of anodyne aristocrats or bureaucrats,
like the lanky, nattily-dressed “Public Prosecutor” (1931), with his beady-eyed
attentiveness.
Frequently, Sander’s
framing of his subjects yields refined abstract effects. “Nun” (1921) shows a
ruddy face, barely visible through an ovoid gap formed from the woman’s tight
fitting wimple. A religious pendant dangles into the midpoint of her white
scapular, which, in its granularity, resembles a painter’s blank canvas. Like
many such portraits, these cold symmetries — visible in work implements,
interior furnishings, and sartorial particulars — call the viewer’s attention
to the far less assured facets of an individual face and body.
Sander knew when to pick
his moments. The candor of his subjects challenges the stereotypes enforced in
the photographs’ titles. The derisively titled “Cretin” (1924) depicts a dwarf
standing between handles of a pushcart. Dressed in a dark three-piece suit and
holding a lit cigarette in his left hand, the young man’s mien projects
self-assuredness, streetwise skepticism and aggressive irony.
If Sander’s work makes
visible the workaday vivacities of academics, bohemians, housewives and
children, Otto Dix’s art tears away those surfaces to portray an unruly domain
of endless combat and vain materialism, sadistic violence and drunken
debauchery.
Like Sander, Dix, born in
1891, came from a working-class family. He volunteered for World War I, serving
as a machine-gunner on the Eastern and Western Front, where he sustained
serious wounds. By the early 1920s, Dix’s painting began to gain wider notice;
the mid-1920s marked his most productive period. The polychromatic dynamism of
Weimar Germany runs rampant in his drawings, etchings and paintings, including rarely
seen watercolors featured in Portraying a Nation.
Dix’s postwar paintings
exemplify the stylized realism of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a
predominant art movement in Weimar Germany. His paintings and prints draw on
past masters, such as German Renaissance painters Matthias Grünewald and Hans
Baldung Grien, as well as Francisco Goya, who retooled traditional realism to
his own ends. While studying at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule (Royal School
of Arts and Crafts) in Dresden, Dix absorbed the explosive harmonies produced
by Vincent Van Gogh. This boisterous impressionism freed him to portray war and
its consequences in uncensored physical totalities. His art speaks to infernal
traumas and corporal tortures, spontaneous ferocities and methodical
brutalities that define humanity as an insatiably war-hungry species.
Otto Dix, “Assault Troops
Advance under Gas (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor)” (1924), etching on paper,
196 x 291 mm, Otto Dix Stiftung (© DACS 2017. Image: Otto Dix Stiftung)
Comprised of five
portfolios containing ten prints each, Dix’s 1924 etching series War (Der
Krieg), based on his experience in WWI, will overwhelm the viewer’s senses.
Life and death intermingle. Ravaged corpses resemble suffering bodies, gas
masks evoke unburied skulls, human viscera dissolves into earth, and troops are
indistinguishable from the fiery trenches and ravaged landscapes in which they
advance and retreat, fight and die. Standing before these harrowing images of
war, injury, and death, the viewer can almost touch the barbed wire and smell
the mustard gas.
Dix’s portraits of Weimar
Germany’s social life, including artists, bohemians, and his friends,
brilliantly capture the affectations and styles of his subjects. His
portraiture documents the hedonism and heady atmosphere that pervaded certain
sectors of German life in the 1920s. “Portrait of the Jeweler Karl Krall”
(1923) captures the campy arrogance of the nouveau riche in the middle aged,
bespectacled jeweler’s ostentatious pose and self-congratulatory air.
Krall’s expertly tailored
brown suit blends into a velvety backdrop of greens and browns. He appears both
hyper-animated and superfluous, just another colorful object in a jeweler’s
atelier. His disproportionately large hands, one adorned with a pinky ring,
clasp his willowy hips, while his torso undulates upward in a sweep of feminine
curves. His pursed lips, reddened cheeks and bald head blaze like gaudy jewels,
rippling with pinks and blues.
For a portrait of photographer
Hugo Erfurth with his dog from 1926, Dix depicts the man and dog in parallel
profiles against a turquoise wall and a brown and gold curtain. As in the Krall
portrait, a well-appointed interior serves as a stage for spotlighting the
pathos of upper middle-class German life. Dix skillfully attends to the large
dog’s vigorous musculature and firm posture, sleek hair, firm ears, half-opened
jaw, beveled teeth and protruding tongue, and alert orange and brown eye; each
canine feature has a counterpoint in Erfurth’s human figure — his stooped
shoulders, sagging cheek, prominent chin and floppy ears, and mild, uncertain
and glazed eyes.
Dix frequently conflates
the animal and human kingdoms, undermining human civilization’s illusion of
progress or superiority. Even the most passionate lovers in his artworks evoke
prey and predator. In the frequently reproduced painting, “Reclining Woman on a
Leopard Skin,” (1927), the scantily clad woman’s bare left arm, vanishing in
and out of the leopard skin, suggests a metamorphosis, underscored by her
feline gaze. Although she seems to lurch out from the picture plane, she
appears to be arrested in her forward motion. As in many of Dix’s eroticized
portraits, the viewer is both drawn in and driven back. We are voyeurs,
complicit in Dix’s creation of an irresistible human zoo.
The range of human situations and individualized histories in Portraying a Nation are nearly impossible to summarize. For Sander and Dix, as for the rest of Germany and the wider world, the aftershocks of The Third Reich continued for years after the war. Sander’s plates for Faces of Our Time were destroyed by the Nazis, and, in 1946, thirty thousand of his negatives were destroyed in a basement fire. As for Dix, he was dismissed from his teaching position at the Dresden Academy of Fine Art following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and his art was famously paraded in the state-sponsored Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in 1937. Though both men lived on for decades after the war, neither totally recovered the creative momentum of the Weimar period. These images and histories linger in one’s memory long after the visitor leaves the Tate’s sharply curated exhibition……………
https://hyperallergic.com/404203/portraying-a-nation-germany-1919-1933-tate-liverpool-2017/
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