Heinrich Kuehn at Neue Galerie

Manhattan's Neue Galerie

By John Camp

Monday was quite a nice day in Manhattan, so I sent off on a 44-block march north from my hotel to the Neue Galerie, a small museum at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street that specializes in German and Austrian art of the early 20th Century. The museum attracted much attention a few years ago when one of its founders paid a reported $135 million for Gustav Klimt's golden portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907). This painting is familiar to many Americans as a poster that seemingly every young intellectual woman of the late 20th Century had hanging in her college dorm room.

Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I

I was going to the museum specifically to see the show "Gustav Klimt: 150th Anniversary Celebration." I don't particularly like Klimt, and I specifically don't like "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," but the collection is generally well worth viewing. When I arrived at the museum, I found that in addition to the Klimt installation, the Neue Galerie was also presenting a photographic show called "Heinrich Kuehn and His American Circle: Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen."

Kuehn is not a familiar figure in America (at least, not to me), so what I have to say about him here is taken from the exhibit information and the accompanying catalog, which is available from Amazon for $36.42. Those sources report that he was an influential figure in the Vienna Secession of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was deeply influential in the Pictorialism movement, one of the first to try to establish photography as an independent art form with a status equal to painting. He was close friends with Alfred Stieglitz and much influenced by Stieglitz's ideas about modernism.

Kuehn was also an avid experimenter in photographic techniques, and was one of the first to try working in color.

Before this exhibit, I was mostly familiar with Pictorialism through books. The Pictorialist aesthetic fell into disrepute with the rise of Modernism, but there are some undeniably beautiful pictures in this exhibition. In modern and post-modern times, it often seems that beauty isn't enough, and is even the object of derision—as not being "serious"—but this show demonstrates (to me) that beauty can be enough. (Impressionism is sometimes considered a lightweight aesthetic because so many of its central works are simply beautiful, without any other obvious meaning or intent; it's notable that many of Kuehn's works are so close to Impressionism.)

Kuehn was not interested in photography as a way to catch fleeting images—he felt that doing so put the emphasis on the machine, rather than the aesthetic. He often worked out his own photographs by sketching the image he wished to make, using the camera only when he was satisfied with the composition.

Whatever you may think of Kuehn's aesthetics, his technical work is fascinating. He worked in an incredibly wide range of printing techniques, and some of his prints, particularly the gum bichromates, are quite large, commonly more than 20 inches in each dimension, and some as large as 30 inches.

He also did autochromes, silver and platinum prints, carbon prints, and bromoils, and worked with several other processes, including some combination processes such as pigments or watercolor over platinum. Seeing large prints of all these processes together on a few walls, with a variety of paper textures and coloring processes, and with an emphasis on the Pictorialist aesthetic, suggested to me that our current preoccupation with resolution and color accuracy is rather stifling.

This Neue Galerie exhibit is worth seeing simply for the variety of techniques on display.

For those of you affected by personal histories: Kuehn (1866–1944) was born into a wealthy bourgeois family that eventually lost its money in the European economic cataclysms of the early 20th century. A conservative man, he became more radically conservative as he aged, and late in life, joined the Nazi Party in Germany.

The show will be up until August 27. General admission is $20, Seniors and Students $10. Children under 12 are not admitted, and those under 16 must be accompanied by an adult.

John

Former Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist John Camp now writes bestselling novels under the nom de plume John Sandford.

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Featured Comment by Jeff: "This video produced in conjunction with the exhibit provides interesting information regarding Kuehn's autochrome process. Kuehn's work appeared in Camera Work on at least two occasions (issue #13, with four works, and issue#33, with 15 works)."

Featured Comment by Eamon Hickey: "I can happily confirm Mr. Camp's reporting: Monday was an (alas, all too rare) exceptionally nice day in Manhattan.

"And your comments about the value of seeing actual prints, as opposed to book reproductions, makes me want to hop on the uptown 6-train and go see for myself, which brings me to an off-topic rant:

"The $20 admission is a real deterrent to me. It's enough money to make me stop and think, 'Is it really worth it?', whereas $10 or even $12 would not be. I felt the same way about the $20 admission to the Cindy Sherman exhibit at MoMA. I ended up going, but I hesitated, and when I paid, I frowned.

"I don't know when museum prices crossed over that magical, mystical line between 'not a factor in my decision' to 'do I really want to spend that?'—maybe it's not new at all? But I'm noticing it this summer, and it seems really lamentable to me.

"Before anyone says it, yes, I know that Manhattan is in a parallel pricing universe (evidently the universe where the Higgs Boson is plated in gold), and I know about Free Fridays, and if you go a lot to one particular museum, membership is a much better deal. I applaud all those efforts—and student discounts, too—to make art accessible. But, phew, $20 is a lot to drop in and look at some pictorialist prints. Not sure I need the experience that bad."

Comments

[Jack]

John,
Your comment, "our current preoccupation with resolution and color accuracy is rather stifling" made me smile. Kuehn would have enjoyed the instagram app on a iPhone. Both Kuehn and Gustav Klimt would have enjoyed digital metallic printing.

The Neue Galerie is one of my new favorites when visiting NYC. It is small enough to not overwhelm the visiter whereas one always leaves the Met thinking one should have spent the entire trip going through all the rooms.
I feel the cafe in the Neue Galerie is an instant flight to Austria, filled with patrons who seem completely at home. Most readers would enjoy it. http://www.neuegalerie.org/cafes/sabarsky

[David]

I've been there to the Neue, had some coffee and torte and then took a self portrait of myself sitting on the toilet in the basement bathroom.

Maybe you could feature it on Random Excellence? It's my wifes fav picture of me.

[Bob Rosinsky]

Great review. I'd like to see this show.

[Mike Johnston]

David,
TMI!

Mike

[Moose]

"Before this exhibit, I was mostly familiar with Pictorialism through books. The Pictorialist aesthetic fell into disrepute with the rise of Modernism, but there are some undeniably beautiful pictures in this exhibition."

I too was mostly familiar with Pictorialism through books. I was lucky enough a couple of years ago to be able to take in a minor traveling exhibit at the Portland, ME museum called Debating Modern Photography: The Triumph of Group f/64. It opened the day we were driving to Boston to leave New England - and we were heading through Portland!

The point of the exhibit was to display a group of pictorialist prints juxtaposed with a group of Group f/64 prints, mostly taken during about the same time frame, as the sea change in styles was occurring. A few photographers were represented in both styles.

Very little well known work. There was a print of Weston's Nautilus Shell in the Pictorialist section, which I found a little disappointing. Not much to see that I haven't already seen in good reproductions. A few others were from good to excellent, to my eye.

In the f/64 group, most of the major players were represented by minor works (in that I was not familiar with them, at least).

Overall, I felt that the f/64 prints were less surprising than the Pictorialists. Clearly, good book reproductions that are reasonably representative of the originals seem to be easier with those kind of prints.

The vagaries of paper and image color, surface textures, size, and so on of the Pictorialist prints have been less well shown in the books I've seen.

Overall, I can't say one style struck me as "best". I have, or at least have had, a personal bias toward sharpness, tonal control, etc., the hallmarks of f/64. But I enjoyed the best of the Pictorialist prints more than the majority of the others.

Unfortunately, there was no printed catalog with images and photography wasn't allowed in that exhibit. When I'm Image Czar, the law will be that they must have one or allow the other. \;~)>

Moose

[Max Cottrell]

Mr Camp: Thanks so much for a well-written and highly informative article. You have inspired me -- photographically, and by your honest, straightforward writing style. Bravo!

[h.linton]

"Your comment, 'our current preoccupation with resolution and color accuracy is rather stifling' made me smile." I had the same reaction.

[Peter Croft]

Nice building! We've got one right here in Perth, Western Australia just like it - at least we did last time I looked about 4 years ago. They've probably demolished it by now, as "they" have demolished just about anything that smacks of "old" in this city.

No, really, our building is very, very similar and I'm inspired now to go back into town and photograph it from a similar angle. Document it. Before it's gone. I do know it's empty and has been for years while "they" haggle about how to gut it and make it into some luxury hotel office hybrid. Better be quick!

Perth, by the way, dates from 1829. We're an historic city, not a newcomer. We used to have magnificent old sandstone buildings but they're nearly all gone.

[Patrick Dodds]

I might be in a minority, and probably logically, morally and philosophically I am on thin ice, but to me this photographer's political affiliations make a difference to how I perceive his work and, were I even able to, I would think twice about going to any exhibition of his. It isn't necessarily a rational response, more an emotional one.

[JMR]

Nice small review. Though my exposure to this work is brief, from what I see, the photographer has a decided painterly style. I like the compositions. And I would say that is what he was trying to accomplish.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Thank you for the heads-up, John. The MFA Houston had a Kühn show last year but I didn't think it traveled. Still, perhaps some of the same loans?

We have 10 Kuhns on the collection at the AIC, although I only recall seeing three in person. I'd like to see this show, and the Neue Galerie (which I've not yet visited), but may not get to NY by the close.

It's hard to predict how Stieglitz's merry band would react to today's digital world but it's fun to try. I think Stieglitz himself would be depressed by it. He would probably shun anything "digital" and, if he'd touch a computer at all, he might end up one of the crabby old guys grumping about on an "analog photography" forum with other like minds.

Kühn, on the other hand, would probably be bankrupted by trying every possible capture, compositing, post-processing, and printing technique he could get his hands on, succeeding with most of them. He'd likely become very successful in the art world and have many collectors investing in his works with eyes toward posthumous run-ups.

But I think that most of the Pictorialists would largely eschew showing much of their work on the Internet. After all, a computer screen has no relationship to the thing-ness of a piece of art, something that they all craved to produce.

[Ade]

Thanks for an enjoyable review of an, as you point out, often neglected style of photographic history. For anyone interested in learning more about the so-called "alternative processes", I highly recommend tracking down a secondhand copy of "Hand Colouring and Alternative Darkroom Processes" by Andrew Sanderson. I have no intention of getting my hands messy with their actual use, but I find the results fascinating.