Getty Museum

Artists' Carnival in Cologne (84.XM.152.101)

Date

about 1931

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

7ca0ab89-05c9-4fe8-959a-8f53866b6f83

> The Cologne Mardi Gras, a season of merrymaking and feasting just before Lent, is one of the most famous carnivals in Germany. During three days in February the city turns topsy-turvy with civic festivities, parades with floats and brass bands, and people in bawdy masquerade celebrating late into the night. In Cologne and throughout the Rhineland, the Feast of Fools was prime time for commercial photographers, who extracted significant amounts of money from their costumed clients. > > As August Sander's son Gunther remembered, the parties given by the progressive artists were considered highlights of the Cologne carnival season. Sander became legendary at these events, making hundreds of pictures of the intellectual and artistic elite in their getups. Throughout the night, a steady flow of patrons would approach the small stage where Sander had set up his camera. He retouched the glass-plate negatives later, numbering them carefully to avoid confusion. > > Sander added some of the prints from the Cologne events to “Citizens of the Twentieth Century” in a portfolio devoted to Festivities. Almost exclusively, it contained pictures of young artists in imaginative makeup and costumes. Their wild, funny performances push to the limit the idea of role-playing and social masquerade, pointing to gesture and movement as central ingredients of portrait photography (see [84.XM.152.158](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/35895/august-sander-heinrich-hoerle-at-a-carnival-heinrich-hoerle-auf-einem-lumpenball-german-about-1930/)). > > For more information on “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” see [84.XM.126.282](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34437/august-sander-shepherd-hirte-german-1913/) and [84.XM.126.83](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34244/august-sander-portrait-of-two-men-german-negative-1912-print-1920s/). > > Originally published in *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 80. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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