The Painter Anton Räderscheidt

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The Painter Anton Räderscheidt is a black-and-white photograph by German photographer August Sander, taken in 1926. It shows the painter Anton Räderscheidt, a member of the New Objectivity movement, standing in a Cologne street. The image was later included in Sander’s 1929 book Face of Our Time. In the 1920s, Sander moved in Cologne’s art scene with painters like Max Ernst and the Räderscheidts (Anton and his wife Marta Hegemann). The couple helped start Dada activities, creating the journal Stupidien in 1920, and they were part of the Cologne Progressives. Sander photographed many of these artists, sometimes several times.

In this photo, Räderscheidt stands alone, wearing a suit and coat with a bowler hat, arms visible, gazing at the viewer with an inquisitive look. The background is a deserted Cologne street with buildings at the side and an empty sidewalk and road, underscoring the sitter’s isolation. Sander likely drew on Räderscheidt’s own paintings, which often show men with bowler hats in lonely urban scenes. A variant from the same session shows the painter with his arms behind his back.

Räderscheidt may have described that variant in the 1926 Neue Kunst, Alte Kunst exhibition catalogue, saying: “I am 34 years old and was born in Cologne. I paint the man with the bowler hat and the hundred percent woman who steers him through the picture. My fondness for the horizontal and the vertical is a means of guiding the observer through my pictures.” A rare print of the back‑hand version sold for $269,000 at Sotheby’s in New York in 2014.

Today, prints of the more well-known version are in several public collections, including the August Sander Archive in Cologne, Städel Museum, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.