ABSTRACT
There is a strange kind of interaction, a shared stasis, between landscape and subject in August Sander’s portraits. It is the very vagueness of the rural setting that is jarring: it can neither contain nor support the vivid and contradictory suggestiveness of the human figures. The lack of eye contact with the viewer makes the figures who are actually human resemble inanimate works of art. The figures cast long shadows, echoed by the shadows of trees receding upward toward the horizon line. Visually, they are firmly rooted in a scene to which they do not truly belong in real life. Mirroring the displacement and lack of connection among the figures are two overlapping and contradictory formal structures. In the painting, a dignified female figure explains the meaning of a Latin tombstone inscription to a group of shepherds. The implied connection between the marginalized Indians and the figures in the Manet painting is of course ironic.
