August Sander and the photography of the present from the Lothar Schirmer collection
Two anniversaries are being celebrated this year in Germany: the 50th anniversary of the death of August Sander in 1964 and the 40th anniversary of the creation of the publishing house Schirmer/Mosel Verlag in 1974. Two major exhibitions will accompany these events in Munich and Cologne.
The Munich publishing house founded by Lothar Schirmer and Erik Mosel defended photography from the beginning, at a time when it was barely recognized as art. Year after year, they published the work of the greatest photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including those by the Bechers and their students at Düsseldorf (Struth, Ruff, Gursky, Höfer, Berges, Nieweg, Rosswog), and Helmut Newton. So far, they have published 1500 art and photobooks—316 remain in print—and the very first was August Sander’s Rheinlandschaften in 1975. This book of beautiful landscape photographs shot near the Rhine will be released again in 2014 with an introduction by the German art historian Wolfgang Kemp.
Lothar Schirmer was a collector before becoming a publisher and gallerist. He began his collection in the 1970s with a set of 80 prints by August Sander. This set of portraits, landscapes and shot of Cologne in the 1930s are being exhibited for the first time in its entirety for the exhibition People in a River Landscape at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Sander’s photographs are being presented alongside work by contemporaries like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff and Cindy Sherman.
In Cologne, the Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse KölnBonn manages the world’s largest collection of August Sander’s work, with 5,500 prints and 11,000 negatives. Currently on display is a tribute exhibition featuring 300 original prints, a part of which have never before been exhibited. Included are the series Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, considered one of the seminal works in the history of photography, commissioned portraits, industrial photographs, architectural photographs, landscapes and views of Herdorf, Linz and Cologne, where Sander lived and worked.
EXHIBITIONS
People in a River Landscape.
August Sander and the photography of the present from the Lothar Schirmer collection
Curator : Inka Graeve Ingelmann
02.04.2014 – 24.08.2014
Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Straße 40
80333 Munich
Germany
http://www.pinakothek.de
Book :
Menschen vor Flusslandschaft
August Sander und die Fotografie der Gegenwart aus der Sammlung Lothar Schirmer
With a text by Inka Graeve Ingelmann and an interview with Lothar Schirmer.
128 pages, 78 illustrations in color and duotone.
ISBN 978-3-8296-0672-1 (German edition)
€ 39.80
http://www.schirmer-mosel.com
« August Sander: Meisterwerke und Entdeckungen »
21.03.2014 – 03.08.2014
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Im Mediapark 7
50670 Cologne
Germany
http://www.photographie-sk-kultur.de
