| August Sander was forty-eight and a lauded, well-established portrait photographer
in Cologne when he made this photograph of the painter Gottfried Brockmann
(1903–1983),
a young artist who was associated with the Gruppe Progressiver Kunstler (Progressive
Artists). Sander befriended, exhibited with, and photographed many members of
the group. Politically leftist, these artists were radically opposed to the ineffectual
Weimar government. They called for art that depicted the organization of work
to reveal the true structure of society. Such revelations, they believed, could
rupture the ruling classes’ control over Germany’s working people.
Their theories held great appeal for Sander, who believed that inner character,
as shaped by work, was discernable in one’s exterior features. . . .
- April Watson, Curatorial and Exhibition Assistant in the Department of Photographs
National Gallery of Art, Washington |
Text excerpted from A Capital Collection: Masterworks from
the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
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