Hugo Henneberg

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In midsummer
Katharinenfleet

Hugo Henneberg (born July 27, 1863 in Vienna ; † July 11, 1918 there ) was an Austrian scientist , graphic artist and art photographer of the pictorialist movement. Together with his friends, photographer Hans Watzek and Heinrich Kühn , he worked under the name Trifolium (Latin for clover , three-leaf ) and developed the three-color rubber printing .

Life

From the age of twelve, Henneberg attended the Salzmann'sche Educational Institute in Schnepfenthal / Thuringia and later the grammar school in Vienna. He went back to Germany to study. He studied physics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics in Jena and received his doctorate in physics in 1888.

After graduating, Henneberg traveled to the USA for a few months. During this stay, he became acquainted with the New York photographer and art patron Alfred Stieglitz , whereupon the two of them wrote correspondence between 1890 and 1909.

At the turn of the century, Henneberg dealt intensively with the art theoretical endeavors and exhibitions of the Munich and Vienna Secession . His contacts and friendships reached far into these artistic circles. Gustav Klimt , for example, portrayed Henneberg's wife Marie in his portrait of Marie Henneberg (1901/1902), which was first shown together with rubber prints by Henneberg and Kühn at the 1902 exhibition of the Vienna Seccession. In addition, the Villa Henneberg on were Hohenwarte that the couple moved into Henneberg 1902 by Josef Hoffmann designed in this Vienna residential area, the homes of the painter Carl Moll and the art collector Spitzer Victor had designed. Together with Klimt and Moll, the Hennebergs went on a trip to Venice in 1899 , where Henneberg made some well-known recordings.

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Turning to photography

Henneberg owned a camera early on and was active as an amateur photographer while still a student, more precisely from 1887. Although he initially continued to study electrical engineering after completing his studies, his trips to Greece and Egypt in 1890 showed an increasing tendency towards photography. By 1891 at the latest, when he joined the Amateur Photographers Club in Vienna, he turned entirely to photography and its technical development.

The Vienna Trifolium and the first exhibitions

At the exhibition of amateur photographers in Salzburg in 1893 , Henneberg had the first opportunity to exhibit his works. Presumably during this exhibition he began his artistic collaboration with Hans Watzek, with whom he had known since joining the Vienna Camera Club. Heinrich Kühn joined them a little later - they had both known him from the Camera Club since 1894 - and together they formed the Trifolium working group . From 1897 they signed their pictures with a stylized clover leaf and their initials. In the same year the team made a trip to Lake Constance . Pictures from this visit have been preserved that show the threefold variation of a motif: All three photographed poplars standing close together in a free plain. The solution to the topic differs significantly and shows the different pictorial inventions. While Kühn chooses a landscape-format image section and sets the motif in extreme blurring, which almost covers the image space, Watzek and Henneberg's works are vertical and spatial. Henneberg aligns the format with the vertical course of the poplars and shifts the horizon far upwards. The trio undertook further trips together to Germany, Italy and Holland between 1895 and 1903 and exhibited in various amateur associations.

The first major exhibition of international importance of the trifolium was the 1st International Elite Exhibition of Artistic Photography planned by Fritz Matthies-Masuren , which took place in the rooms of the Munich Seccession in 1898 and in which the trio provided the largest share of works. Alfred Buschbeck wrote about Henneberg's position within the clover leaf: “It is undisputed that in the trifolium he is the one who is most finely able to reproduce what is called tone or mood in the artistic sense. His quiet, incredibly modest, almost shy manner has meant that he only counts warm friends in the camera club [...]. It is astonishing how even the most violent opponents of the modern direction in photography, even without knowing him, almost never made his works the target of their scorn, which they tend to pour out all the more fondly on his two colleagues and especially on Kühn. This special position often caused him [...] doubts about the value of his work, as we once heard him [...] exclaim: 'There must be something wrong with my pictures when someone rebukes Kühn in one sentence and praises me can! '"

The rubber print as a photographic work focus

At the latest when he was accepted into the British art photographer association The Linked Ring in 1894, Henneberg also became familiar with the international varieties of art photography. His membership also made it easier for him to take part in international exhibitions. 1895 Henneberg acquired on the Third Exhibition of the Photographic Salon in London , he participated in the self, the rubber pressure Rouen by Robert Demachy . Fascinated by its technology, he asked Demachy for help, who explained the process to him in a letter. Thereupon Henneberg tried his hand at the technique of rubber printing and introduced it as a pictorial medium to his Viennese group of photographers.

From then on, rubber printing became Henneberg's favorite imaging method. The landscape was his mostly worked subject . In 1902, Henneberg succeeded in producing the first three-color combination rubber print, the development of which was based on Watzek's two-color process. In the same year, this photographic novelty was shown to a broad public for the first time at the aforementioned exhibition of the Vienna Seccession. Stieglitz selected Henneberg early in 1897 as a representative of Austrian art photography and published several of Henneberg's works in his magazine Camera Notes .

Publications and developments

Henneberg was also active as a journalist in the field of art photography and published numerous essays and articles in various magazines. He also translated articles by foreign language photographers, such as Henry Peach Robinson's essay Individuality for Wiener Photographischen Blätter. From 1903 he worked actively with the Art Nouveau magazine Ver Sacrum . Furthermore, Henneberg worked intensively on camera and printing techniques and continuously developed rubber printing together with Kühn and Watzek. The aim was to be able to precisely control the tonal values in the image. In contrast to his friends, Henneberg also advocated the use of retouching in order to bring lights, medium tones and dark tones into an image-appropriate relationship. In addition, with the combination rubber printing, he also developed another possibility to combine details from different images in one image (e.g. copying in clouds). In 1896 or before he constructed a camera for landscape photography in the format 40 × 60 cm.

Late work: painting and etching

With the death of Watzek in 1904, the trifolium dissolved. Henneberg, who had already started painting in the previous years, now turned completely to the classical fine arts, because he “had seen photography as too difficult”. The landscape remained his thematic focus. In 1910 he made the large Wachau folder with prints that had been made during his trip to Lower Austria.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Yearbook for Photography and Reproduction Processes , Halle: Wilhelm Knapp 1921, p. 19.
  2. ↑ Dissertation topic: On the thermal conductivity of mixtures of ethyl alcohol and water , Vienna: Carl Gerolds Sohn 1888, 51 pages.
  3. ↑ a b c d Otto Hochreiter / Timm Starl: Lexicon of Austrian Photography , in: Ders. (Ed.): History of Photography in Austria , Vol. 2, pp. 93–209, p. 127.
  4. ↑ Monika Faber / Astrid Mahler: Heinrich Kühn. The perfect photography . Vienna: Hatje Cantz 2010, p. 26.
  5. ↑ Yearbook Photographische Rundschau . 1891, p. 196.
  6. ↑ Photo Collection Kunsthaus Zurich. The Marc Rich Collection. June 10 to August 20, 1989 [exhibition catalog], p. 38.
  7. ↑ Faber / Mahler: Heinrich Kühn , p. 56 f.
  8. ^ Alfred Buschbeck: The trifolium of the Vienna Camera Club: Hans Watzek. Hugo Henneberg. Heinrich Kühn . in: The Art of Photography , Volume II (1898), pp. 17–24.
  9. ^ Christian A. Peterson: Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes , The Minneapolis Institute of Art 1993 [exhibition catalog], p. 26.
  10. ↑ For example: Experiences about rubber printing in the landscape subject, in: Wiener Photographische Blätter, vol. IV (1897), no. 11, pp. 229–236.
  11. ↑ Chapter XX from HP Robinsons The Elements of a Pictorial Photography , Bradford 1896, Reprint NY 1983.
  12. ↑ Henneberg: Praktische Mittheilungen für Landschaftsphotographen , in: Wiener Photographische Blätter , Vol. II (1895), Issue 6, pp. 89–95.
  13. ^ Henneberg: A camera for landscape shots in the format of 40x60 cm , in: Wiener Photographische Blätter , vol. III, booklet 8, pp. 27-29.
  14. ↑ Recalled quote from Alvin Langdon Coburn, quoted in n .: Hochreiter / Starl: Lexicon of Austrian Photography , in: Ders. (Ed.): History of Photography in Austria , Vol. 2, pp. 93–209, p. 127.
  15. ↑ http://galerie-walfischgasse.com/publikationen/Hugo_Henneberg.pdf

literature

Web links

Commons : Hugo Henneberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Henneberg, Hugo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian photographer of pictorialism
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH July 11, 1918
Place of death Vienna