"Bois de Boulogne, Paris"

gelatin silver print on Agfa paper

printer’s stamp, signed and dated by Julian Sander (pencil), numbered by Gerd Sander (pencil) on verso

"She sits in the Bois de Boulogne … and prays. That is a Bible - but I can identify this kind of a woman. She is from the haute-bourgeoisie. She is very well-off or well-off, probably widow - she has nothing to do but live and pray with a kind of elegance and distinction…"¹
Lisette Model

Lisette Model was born in Vienna, where she studied piano and composition theory with Arnold Schönberg. After her father's death, Lisette moved to France with her mother and sister in 1926. In Paris, she began a brief course of study in singing, then switched to painting with André Lhote, a Cubist whose students also included Henri Cartier-Bresson and Dora Maar. She soon turned to photography, which offered her a more direct form of expression. Supported by her sister Olga, she learned objective street and portrait photography from Rogi André and later deepened her training with Florence Henri, who combined painting and photography. These experiences shaped her modernist style, characterized by a love of experimentation, formal boldness, and a social perspective.
In the 1930s, Model photographed the social inequality around her: beggars and street vendors stood in contrast to the complacent bourgeoisie in Parisian cafés. In the series "Promenade des Anglais," she captured the wealthy idlers on the Riviera in Nice from 1934 to 1938 in a detached and grotesque manner – sharp in composition, critical in tone, mirroring a society on the brink of collapse. She published many of her works anonymously or under a pseudonym in left-wing magazines, for the first time in Regards in 1935.
In Paris, she met the Russian painter Evsa Model, a member of the avant-garde circle Cercle et Carré. Her contacts with this milieu broadened her understanding of formal abstraction, which shaped her later photographic compositional power. They married in 1937 and emigrated to New York in 1938, seeking safety and new creative opportunities in the face of growing fascism and anti-Semitic violence in Europe.²
(Christoph Fuchs)

Notes

1
Galerie Julian Sander, Cologne

2
cf. Audrey Sands, “Lisette Model: Trust Your Eyes” in: Galerie Julian Sander (ed.), Model. Gerd Sander Collection Part 4, exhibition catalog, Galerie Julian Sander, Cologne 2025, pp. 6–12.