KAHN Albert (EN)

Biographical article

Albert Kahn was born in Marmoutier, the capital of the Bas-Rhin department of northern France, on March 3, 1860 in a family of cattle dealers belonging to the city’s Jewish community. He was the eldest of a family of six children and was named Abraham. His mother died in 1870, shortly before the start of the war which saw the annexation of Alsace and Moselle by the new German empire. He was then raised by his aunt and joined the collège of Saverne. In 1876, he arrived in Paris with an emigration permit granted by the Imperial German government. After first working in a clothing house on the Grands Boulevards,  he joined the bank of his distant cousins Charles (1842-1925) and Edmond Goudchaux (1843-1907) in 1878. Simultaneously, having resumed his studies, in 1879 he became the top student and a friend of the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and obtained a bachelor's degree in letters and a law degree. By 1894 he had risen to the position of partner in this bank (Beausoleil J., Ory P., Albert Kahn, 1860-1940. Réalités d’une utopia, 1995; Albert Kahn, singular et plural, 2015).

He settled in Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1892 and acquired several plots for the development of a garden from 1895 to 1920. The garden was to be composed of landscape scenes embellished with "factories" and forests: French garden, orchard, rose garden, English garden, Japanese village, blue forest and marshes, meadow and golden forest, Vosges forest and Chinese-Alpine garden. In 1897, he bought land in Cap-Martin, near Menton, where he built a main villa around which he laid out gardens with collections of exotic plants. To this property he added two other villas built by the same architect. He often stayed at Cap-Martin in the company of prestigious guests.

In 1898, Albert Kahn founded his own bank and at the same time created his first philanthropic work: the “Autour du Monde” scholarships, which allowed young associates to enrich their skills and future education through direct confrontation with the world.

This initial foundation was followed by the creation in 1906 of the Société Autour du Monde, then by a dozen other foundations that developed further until 1932. Their purpose was to provide continuing education to the elites who directed public affairs with the aim of fostering a better mutual understanding of nations, thus promoting peace. Thus in 1916, he set up the Comité national des études socials et politiques (CNESP), headquartered at the Court of Cassation in Paris, which organised debates between politicians and specialists on various current topics and published thirteen journals.

In 1920, he created the centre for social documentation at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), followed by other places of higher education, which aimed to train young researchers in economics and social sciences. He also supported the Laboratoire de biologie et de cinématographie scientifique directed by Doctor Jean Comandon (1877-1970), housed in his property in Boulogne. To ensure the perpetuity of these various structures, he signed an agreement with the Université de Paris in 1929, which created a centre capable of continuing his efforts. Among these foundations, the Archives de la Planète occupy a singular place. This visual and documentary enterprise aimed to record, by means of colour photography (autochrome) and film, a state of the world “at the critical hour of one of the most complete economic, geographical and historical ‘transformations’ that we have ever seen.” Initially, Albert Kahn conducted this vast documentation program himself.Then from 1912, he entrusted its scientific direction to the geographer Jean Brunhes (1869-1930). For nearly twenty years, a dozen technicians traveled to 50 countries and produced nearly 72,000 photographic plates as well as a hundred hours of films.

The stock market crisis of 1929 impacted the Kahn bank from 1931 and led to the gradual cessation of the foundations’ activities. Successive sales did not manage to prevent the ruin of the banker, who became hedged in by his creditors. In 1936, the Seine department bought the Boulogne property, whose gardens opened to the public on the occasion of the 1937 international exhibition. Albert Kahn benefited from the usufruct of his house until his death, which occurred during the night of November 13 to 14, 1940. He was buried in 1941 in the Boulogne-Billancourt cemetery.

The Photograph and Film Collection

The first elements related to Asia in the iconographic collections are stereoscopic black and white and autochrome photographs as well as films made mainly in Japan and China, as well as during stops in Singapore, Penang and Colombo. Most of these images are the work of Albert Dutertre (1884-1964), Albert Kahn’s driver and mechanic. Trained in photographic and film shooting techniques, he accompanied the banker during his trip to Japan and China from 1908-1909, during which more than 3,000 stereoscopic plates were produced and hundreds of meters of film recorded. There are also around a hundred plaques made by Jacques Gachet (1881-1948) who worked for the French delegation in Beijing. This delegation probably offered the plaques to Kahn. In Japan, Albert Dutertre recorded the modern districts of Tokyo and Yokohama, the sites of Nikko and Kyoto, and eminent personalities of the Meiji era (1868-1912) that he encountered during official receptions or private visits, such as Baron Itchiro Motono (1862-1918), Count Shigenobu Okuma (1838-1922), and Marquis Masayoshi Matsukata (1835-1924). The views of the gardens of these figures’ residences echo Albert Kahn's taste for the skilful landscape organisation that was being recreated in Boulogne even as he visited the archipelago. In China, his exploration of the countryside focused on an ethnographic view of the populations and their ways of life, the bustle of the streets, New Year festivities, the modes of transport, and funeral rituals, supplemented by shots of remarkable sites (Beijing temples, Ming tombs, the Great Wall.)

This iconographic collection constitutes the beginnings of the vast project of image production called the Archives de la Planète that Albert Kahn set up from 1912 by recruiting a scientific director and professional operators. This company, which aimed to constitute a visual testimony of the contemporary world, used the two innovative processes of cinema and the colour photography.

From the outset of the project, the Far East was the destination of the first missions organised outside Europe:

– Passet Missions (1912 and 1913) in North China, Inner Mongolia, Mongolia, Japan: 228 autochrome plates, 117 black and white plates, 14 minutes of silent black and white nitrate film;

– Passet Mission (1914) in India: 400 autochrome plates, 49 minutes of silent black and white nitrate film;

– Léon Busy (1913, 1914, 1916) in Indochina: 1,508 autochrome plates, 60 minutes of silent black and white nitrate film;

– Dumas Mission (1926-1927) in Japan: 2,712 plates and 60 minutes of silent black and white nitrate film;

 – Dumas Mission (1927) in India: 714 plates and 124.62 minutes of silent black and white nitrate film.

In parallel with the images from the Archives de la Planète taken during these missions, Albert Kahn's operators produced portraits of Asian personalities during their visits to Boulogne, during screenings to which they were invited by the banker, and more rarely in Cap Martin. These images were made with autochrome photographic plates as well as silent black and white nitrate films.

Other iconographic archives containing content relating to Asia and resulting from acquisitions and donations have gradually enriched the museum's collections (Piry, Le Play, Lucien Bourgogne, Alain Petit, Walther, Gachet funds).

Many original elements from Japan are present in the Japanese sections of the Boulogne gardens. Some are still preserved, while others have disappeared, but the autochromes and the few films made in the garden by Albert Kahn's technicians preserve visual evidence. These landscape elements were acquired from 1898, then in 1908-1909. They were intended for the development of two emblematic landscape representations that the latter had arranged on his property in Boulogne: the Japanese village and the sanctuary. Occupying the largest surface within the garden, these testify to the search for authenticity that drove this banker who had been able to discover the richness and diversity of the gardens of his Japanese contacts during his travels in Japan. They were installed just after his return: the “village” in 1898, and the sanctuary in the winter of 1908-1909. The village, built in 1898, originally comprised a set of three tea houses (two of the sencha type, in vogue at the end of the 19th century, and a pavilion of the more traditional macha type), a five-storey pagoda, a bathroom. Several stone (ishi dôrô) and bronze lanterns completed the scene as well as two porticos closing the access to this set. The pagoda has disappeared, as well as the tea pavilion which was replaced in the 1960s by a tea house offered by the Japanese government and the Urasenke school. The second, built during the winter of 1908-1909, was intended to be an evocation of the sacred sites of Japan. Two torii (porticoes of Shinto shrines) marked its boundaries. Two bridges placed side-by-side, one red lacquered, a reproduction of that of the Nikko sanctuary, and another painted brown, spanned the basin and led to the sôrintô or "spire pagoda". This element, unique in the Japanese gardens of Europe at that time, was also a reproduction of that of the Rinno-ji temple in Nikko. On a low rise nearby was a miniature reproduction of the facade of Kyoto's famous temple, the Kyomizu-dera. It was accessed by a torii, leading to a steep path lined with stone lanterns. This part of the garden was completely transformed in 1990. Only the two bridges and an element of the terrace of the facade of the temple remain.

The museum's collections can be viewed from this link.