This exhibition is organised by the Albertina of Vienna in collaboration with the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Heinrich Kühn’s great ambition was to created photographs whose artistic merit rivalled painting.
An important figure in international Pictorialism around 1900, and closely linked with Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, the two great representatives of that movement, Kühn succeeded in developing a modernist body of work within the rather limited iconographic context of his family.
He had already acquired a considerable expertise in microscopic photography while still a medical student in Innsbruck. He had joined the “Camera Club” of Vienna, and it was there, around 1895, that he met Hugo Henneberg and Hans Watzek, both passionate supporters of the movement advocating photography as an independent art form. This international movement put them in
contact with two avant-garde associations, the “Linked Ring” in London and the “Photo Club de Paris”. Together they threw themselves into experimenting with new techniques, especially with gum bichromate applied with a paintbrush, giving the print a painterly appearance – a technique
highlighted by Robert Demachy. In Vienna, the members of the “Trifolium” (Watzek, Kühn and Henneberg) took part in the Secession where they exhibited extremely large format photographs intended to challenge painting.
From 1904, the friendship between Heinrich Kühn and Alfred Stieglitz grew ever stronger. Kühn’s art would move radically away from “Romantic” Impressionism, with its classical still lifes, dramatic
landscapes, and above all group portraits, to a less detailed and almost abstract style where only the study of light and the rendering of tonal values mattered, a style that reflected the development of the Vienna Secession. Kühn thus produced photographs that defied conventions, and which at times consisted merely of reflections in a glass of water or of a transparent shadow against a wall.
From 1907, Kuhn was the undisputed master of the autochrome, a technique with rich and delicate colours perfected by the Lumière brothers. Its bold and highly simplified compositions put his openair
scenes, in particular, ahead of their time.
This exhibition is the first great retrospective devoted to this artist.
