Heinrich Kuhn & Leon Dabo: Correspondences

His ambition was nothing less than to make  photography a medium of equal prestige to the paintings of great artists. We see this most clearly, without distractions, in his landscapes.  Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944)  became a respected photographer in turn of the century Pictorialism.   Kühn developed a  body of work that, although limited to the context of his personal life, was admired internationally.

Over time Kühn's style evolved away from an impressionistic rendering of  detail and toward abstraction, concentrated ever more on the quality of light and  a photographic version of tonalism, also a term borrowed from painting. 

Leon Dabo (1865-1960), a Parisian born painter, is usually considered an American because his best known works are Hudson Valley landscapes. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur and an Ami of the Societe des Arts, Versailles, among other honors, for his contributions to art, and his pictures were often shown in Paris at times when Kuhn might well have seen them.  There is, at least, at the same zeitgeist on view in their images. 

The monkier of  'man of the world' was made for Dabo.  Although his family moved to Detroit to escape the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to study art in Nancy and Munich.  It was Edmond-Aman Jean who first recognized and promoted Dabo's talent, assuring a successful career in Paris. During World War I, Dabo offered his services as a multi-lingual translator to the intelligence agencies  of of his native country.

Both Kuhn and Dabo were practitioers of what you could call the humanist landscape, a place where humans can exist and feel a part of the natural setting.  The late landscape geographer and founder of Landscape magazine J. Brinckerhoff Jackson (born in Dinard, France) was an apostle of this view.   Backlighting, especially as seen through trees, was a common motif and frequently used by early photographers. Landscapes dominated by variations on one note of color, a technique borrowed from tonalism.  For Kuhn, using the unstable medium of early photographic printing, the achievement was almost heroic.

Images:

1. Heinrich Kuhn - Isarauen, 1897, Albertina Museum, Vienna.

2. Heinrich Kuhn - Evening On the Schlesheimer Canal, 1899, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
3. Leon Dabo - Night Shore. Long Island, undated, private collection.
4. Leon Dabo - Midsummer Night, private collection.
5. Heinrich Kuhn -  Die Wiese, 1898, Folkwang Museum, Essen.
For further reading:
Heinrich Kuhn: The Perfect Photograph, edited by Monika Faber, Germany, Hatje Cantz, y: 2010
Leon Dabo: Poet Of Color by J. Spargo, in The Craftsman, volume 13, New York.
Discovering The Vernacular Landscape, J. B. Jackson, New Haven, Yale University Press: 1984