| Recent gifts to the museum’s growing collection of photography include works by two pioneering photographers of the early twentieth century, William Dassonville (1879-1957) and August Sander (1876-1964). Based in San Francisco, Dassonville gained national and international acclaim for his insightful portraits, but most notably for his evocative photographs of the California landscape, of which Northern Sonoma County (about 1930) is a stunning example. His photographs hung in exhibitions alongside the work of Alfred Stieglitz and other important members of the Photo-Secession, and his images were frequently published in books and magazines both in America and Europe. The museum’s collection now boasts over twenty works by Dassonville. August Sander (1876-1964), a European contemporary of Dassonville’s, honed his talent as a photographer in his native Germany, taking up landscape, nature, architecture and street life as his subjects. Also a gifted portraitist, he is best known for People of the Twentieth Century (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts), which was envisioned as a comprehensive visual record of the German populace. One of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of photography, the project occupied Sander for some forty years, beginning in the early 1920s until his death, during which he took portraits of hundreds of German citizens and then categorized them by social type and occupation—from farm laborers, circus performers and prosperous businessmen to aristocrats and artists. Remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character and lifestyle, Sander’s individual images, including The Painters Anton Raderschiedt and Marta Hegemann, shot in 1924, stand out as high points of photographic portraiture and collectively propose the idea of the archive as art. This portrait joins four others newly acquired by the museum. |
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Allentown Art Museum • 31 N. 5th Street • Allentown, PA 18101 610.432.4333 • | ||
