Albert Kahn

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Albert Kahn (born March 3, 1860 in Marmoutier , † November 14, 1940 in Boulogne-Billancourt ) was a French banker and one of the richest men in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. He was a pioneer in color photography .

Life

Albert Kahn garden

Albert Kahn was born the son of a Jewish cattle dealer in Alsace and was one of five siblings. At the age of nineteen he went to Paris , where he found a job as a bank clerk. At the same time he studied literature and law . In 1884 he passed the state examination in law.

During his studies, he made friends with Henri Bergson , who became a lifelong friend. In 1892 Kahn became a director and partner in the important Goudchaux banking house in Paris. The purchase of his property in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris fell in 1893. Here he had a spacious garden designed by the landscape architect Achille Duchêne in the years 1894–1910 , which reflects the gardening culture of different countries. The garden and the buildings belonging to it were used by Kahn to maintain contacts with his friends, including Albert Einstein , Austen Chamberlain , Raymond Barrès , Paul Valéry , Anatole France and Auguste Rodin .

In 1898 he founded the Bourses Autour du Monde foundation , which was supposed to allow young academics to travel the world for a year. This resulted in the Autour du Monde discussion group in 1906 , in which impressions and experiences of these trips were discussed. In 1916 the Comité national d'Etudes sociales et politiques was founded , in which influential personalities discussed current issues. The committee, in whose meetings German politicians also took part, met for the last time in 1931.

His book Des droits et des devoirs des gouvernements (Rights and Duties of Governments) was published in 1918.

In 1926, Jean Comandon took over the management of the biological laboratory for scientific cinematography at the Pasteur Institute founded by Albert Kahn .

In the aftermath of the stock market and global economic crisis in 1929, Kahn lost all of his fortune and died completely impoverished in 1940 after the German occupation of France.

Les Archives de la Planète

Albert Kahn used his fortune to set up the largest ethnological photo and film project of the time between 1908 and 1930 - "Les Archives de la Planète" (The Archives of the Planet) . This includes more than a hundred hours of film and over 72,000 color photographs from around the world. His idea was to create an understanding of other people and their culture and thus a peaceful world through the visual representation of everyday life from all parts of the world. At the same time, however, his archive also captured many cultures in Europe, Africa, America and Asia that have since disappeared, ways of life that disappeared over the next few years due to the emerging technical revolution.

Kahn made use of the autochrome process invented by the Lumière brothers in 1903 , which was the first photographic process to enable images with real colors.

Albert Kahn's archive is now kept in the Musée Albert-Kahn in Paris. A BBC series "The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn" (The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn) and a book about the series trying to raise the treasure that is the archive for today's world. The first exhibition of these pictures after the Second World War took place in 1981 as part of the “Color in Photo” exhibition in the Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle in Cologne . In 2010, the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf organized the first individual exhibition on Albert Kahn and the "Archives of the Planet" in Germany. In 2014 almost 200 pictures from the archive were shown as part of the exhibition “The World around 1914 - Color Photography Before the Great War” in the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn and the Berlin Martin-Gropius-Bau ; in 2015 this exhibition was shown in the Museum Rietberg in Zurich .

  • Paris, 1912, Eiffel Tower and Trocadero

  • Paris, 1914, Porte Saint-Denis

  • Paris, 1914, family

  • Giza, Egypt, 1914, Great Pyramid and Sphinx

  • Fez, Morocco, 1913, Senegalese sniper

  • Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1912, bread merchants in the market

  • Krusevac, Serbia, 1913, poultry sellers in the market

  • Istanbul, Turkey, 1912, wooden houses in Beyoğlu

  • Inner Mongolia, 1912

  • Mongolia, 1913, Buddhist Lama

  • Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 1913, convict and guard in prison

  • Bombay, India, 1913, Sadus

  • Lahore, Pakistan, 1914, Sadu and Brahmin

  • Beijing, China, 1913, Buddhist Lama in ceremonial robe

literature

Fonts

  • Albert Kahn: Des droits et des devoirs des gouvernements . Imprimerie de Vaugirad, Paris 1918.
  • Sophie Cœuré, Frédéric Worms (ed.): Albert Kahn - Henri Bergson. Correspondances , Edition Desmaret, Paris 2003

Secondary literature

  • Paula Amad: Cinema's sanctuary: From pre-documentary to documentary film in Albert Kahn's Archives de la planète (1908–1931) , in: Film History , Volume 13, 2001, pp. 138–159.
  • Paula Amad: Albert Kahn's “Archives de la planète” (1908–1931). Between cinematographic view and documentary film , in: Greetings from Viktoria. Film views from a distance (= KINtop Schriften 7), Filmmuseum Düsseldorf (ed.), Stroemfeld / Roter Stern, Basel and Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 206–233 (shortened German version).
  • Jeanne Beausoleil (Ed.): Albert Kahn, réalités d'une utopie: 1860–1940 (for the exhibition from November 28, 1995– September 15, 1996). Musée Albert-Kahn, Boulogne-Billancourt 1995, ISBN 2-906599-17-4
  • Chine. Catalog des photographies et des séquences filmées du Musée Albert-Kahn , Musée Albert-Kahn, Boulogne-Billancourt 2001
  • Christoph Danelzik-Brüggemann (Hrsg.): Cities of the world. Early color photographs from the Musée Albert-Kahn in dialogue with the photographic collection , exhibition catalog Stadtmuseum Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf on the occasion of the exhibition from May 29th – 5th. September 2010, Droste, Düsseldorf 2013, ISBN 978-3-7700-1459-0
  • Markus Köster (Hrsg.): Der Ruhrkampf, La Bataille de la Ruhr - French film recordings from Westphalia and the Rhineland 1921–1925 . Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, Münster 2006, pp. 21–24, ISBN 3-923432-51-8 . Available online (PDF, 350 kB)

Literary processing

Web links

Commons : Albert Kahn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Movie

  • Albert Kahn, banker and pacifist (Le voyage d'Albert Kahn) , documentary by Mehdi Lallaoui, F 2006
  • The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn , five-part TV series by the BBC, directed by David Okuefuna and Rosie Schellenberg, GB 2007
  • Citizen Kahn - Banker and patron of the arts (Albert Kahn, reflets d'un monde disparu) , documentary by Augustin Viatte, F 2016

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cities of the World - Early Color Photographs from the Musée Albert-Kahn in Dialogue with the Photographic Collection . Duesseldorf.de. Retrieved March 29, 2018.
  2. ↑ World in Color - Color Photography before 1914. Exhibition from May 8 to September 27, 2015, Museum Rietberg . Retrieved March 29, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Kahn, Albert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French banker, philanthropist, collector and patron
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Marmoutier
DATE OF DEATH November 14, 1940
Place of death Boulogne-Billancourt