From Man to Man - Wilhelm Leibl & August Sander

  
  
Fifty years ago, in 1964, the great photographer August Sander died in Cologne. His far-reaching influence on later photographers, for instance the Düsseldorf-based Becher School, and also filmmakers such as the Austrian director Michael Haneke has been noted several times. The exhibition From Man to Man. Wilhelm Leibl & August Sander is the first ever to explore the theme of Sander’s relationship to nineteenth-century painting. The exhibition of portraits juxtaposes his photographs to the paintings of an artist whom Sander himself mentions in a letter: Wilhelm Leibl. The photographer became acquainted in all detail with the artist’s work in a posthumous retrospective in Cologne in 1929. Leibl was born in Cologne, but left the city in 1863 and found success as a painter elsewhere, at first in Munich. Sander was born and grew up in Herdorf in the Westerwald region to the south of Cologne, and at first worked in Linz, in Austria. But it was in Cologne, where he moved in 1910, that he achieved fame as a photographer.
While their lifetimes overlapped by a quarter of a century, there is no evidence that the paths of Leibl (1844–1900) and Sander (1876–1964) ever crossed. If they are meeting here and now, this is due to a collaboration between the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud and the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur. The dialogue between two outstanding masters of the human image was worked out jointly between these two Cologne institutions. In nine exhibition chapters, we see a surprising variety of tangents, intersections and parallels as demonstrated by the respective portrait oeuvre of Wilhelm Leibl and August Sand
  
Sons and Fathers
Our show starts with (auto)biographical material. Gathered together here are self-portraits by Wilhelm Leibl and August Sander along with portraits of their fathers and in Sander’s case also his children. In Leibl’s self-portrait (no. 1) there is an appealing tension between the miniature format and the sketch-like technique. The portrait of his father (no. 3) shows Leibl already in potential competition with photography. The early self-portrait by August Sander (no. 2) bears witness to a (multiple) media feedback: it recalls portrait paintings by Franz von Lenbach, which, for their part, are known often to have been executed with the help of photographs …  
Archetypes
The heading of this chapter refers to Sander’s famous Stammappe, which in our exhibition is being shown in its entirety, including an extremely rare variant. To a high degree, it is not just an album of the (Westerwald) peasantry, but also of the old person. As in the following exhibition chapters Melancholia and Confidence, we here gain an insight into historical, gender-based and age-related role images. Thus for example it becomes evident that the rosary in Leibl’s portrait of The Old Parisienne (no. 14) is no mere studio prop: even in August Sander’s photographs the old lady, portrayed in her own accustomed surroundings, often holds devotional reading matter in her hands.   
Melancholia
Depression bears here, as in the film by Lars von Trier (2011), its old Latin name. This recalls Dürer’s famous copper engraving Melencolia of 1514, and refers to the quasi-allegorical quality of the pictures shown here. While old women in Leibl’s and Sander’s pictures seem to represent piety first and foremost (see chapter 2: Archetypes), painted or photographed young women often appear as embodiments of melancholy. We even have the ‘dark face’, which according to the old theory of humours was caused in the melancholic by an excess of black bile. Here, as so often in the history of art, it is explained by the specific lighting conditions (nos. 23, 27).   
Posing
This small, but particularly exciting group of individual portraits of men and women is distinguished by the conspicuous physical attitudes of the sitters. They signal emotional expressivity, self-confidence and nonchalance – these days we might even say coolness. In a manner that at the time was, if anything, provocative, artistic and bohemian circles are presented as counter-designs to bourgeois satiation, as extravagant as they are enticing. Art-historical exemplars play a major role: Leibl quotes Dutch Baroque painting (no. 33). Sander summons up the exaltedness of an El Greco (no. 35) and the portraiture of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (no. 31). In the portrait of Otto Dix (no. 32), Sander’s links to the painting of Neue Sachlichkeit also become palpable.   
Confidence
A contrast, confusing from today’s point of view, with the women’s portraits shown in chapter 3 (Melancholia) is formed by the portraits of men of middle and advanced age gathered here. Their body language and compositional mise-en-scène is far more conservative: the majority of both the paintings and the photographs go back to schemata that were developed in the Renaissance (especially by Titian) for the ruler portrait. Recognition and self-confidence are documented by philosophical or visionary poses. They betray the male claim to dominance in the spheres of economic success and social control. One exception is a likeness of a lawyer by Leibl, reminiscent of a self-portrait, which is as reduced as it is concentrated (no. 39).  
Cropping
In older periods of art history, fragments (of sculptures, pots, manuscripts and the like) often bring to mind war, iconoclastic outbreaks, natural disasters or sheer neglect. Just like the architectural ruin, the fragment stimulates the imagination as one tries willy-nilly to conclude what the whole might have looked like. Insofar, the fragment is related to the unfinished work. By the nineteenth century at the latest, there had developed, under the influence of Far Eastern prints, an aesthetic of cropping. It entered into an interaction with technical achievements such as photography (viewfinder) and film (cadrage). Cropping is used for different reasons by Sander and Leibl, but in appearance and effect, they are comparable. Photographs created as enlargements of a part of a bigger picture or deliberately shot as a detail are confronted by morceaux de peinture (pieces of painting) that point to the tragic fates of pictures.   
Artists’ Heads
Among both Leibl’s and Sander’s portraits there are a conspicuously large number of likenesses of artists, often painters with whom the portraitists were acquainted or even friends. One thing these works have in common is their focus on striking facial features. In many cases, the gaze of the sitter is turned directly towards the beholder, sometimes even in a quasi-hypnotic fashion (nos. 52, 53). If we bear in mind the circumstance that none of the so alert-looking artists is still alive today, we feel inexorably reminded of Edgar Allan Poe, an admirer of early photography. In his short story The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) an author on the point of death is hypnotized and his decease suspended.   
Interior Worlds
The pictures shown here lead us into seemingly unassuming interiors. And yet various questions are raised: do the rooms put their stamp on their users, or vice versa? These paintings and photographs – are they portraits or genre scenes? Sometimes it is even unclear whether the depicted activities should be understood as work or leisure, as compulsory or optional. Against the background of late-nineteenth-century depictions of weavers, for example in the work of Gerhart Hauptmann or Käthe Kollwitz, we might be surprised by the apparently apolitical pictures by Leibl and Sander, concentrating as they do only on artistic problems (such as light, atmosphere etc.). What is certainly revolutionary is Leibl’s painterly penetration into the aesthetics of photography with a huge, fully signed sketch (no. 63).  
Exterior Worlds
According to an influential scholarly thesis, an artistic depiction of a landscape only arises at the moment when the human being (for example as a city-dweller) feels alienated from nature. In view of the current enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits and the development of the accompanying leisure industry it is striking to what extent nature both in Leibl and in Sander is still seen as a workplace. In spite of this feature in common, we see here that for his plein air photography August Sander was influenced more by French role models such as the pre-Impressionist painter Jean-François Millet than by the German Wilhelm Leibl. Conversely, there are two paintings here (nos. 69 and 72) which were partly based on photographs, albeit not by Sander.
  
Salzburg Museum | Neue Residenz | Kunsthalle
11 July 2014 - 5 January 2015

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