So far so close

“Eyes wide open”: Albert Kahn's journey around the world

Audio 48:30

Young women in Albert Kahn's garden, Property of Albert Kahn, Boulogne, France, 1910. © Department of Hauts-de-Seine / Albert-Kahn Departmental Museum

By: Céline Develay Mazurelle Follow

3 mins

On the occasion of the reopening of the Albert Kahn Departmental Museum in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris region, we are going to the planet, high in colors and images, of this iconoclastic banker and philanthropist and visionary of the 19th century.

Advertisement

Traveling is “keeping your eyes wide open”, said the man who, in 1898, once his bank was founded, was to create his first philanthropic enterprise: the “Around the World” scholarships.

These 15-month travel grants, financed by Kahn, were then intended for French associates, first men, then women and foreigners, with the idea of ​​modifying the view of the elites, decentralizing them and opening them to the world by experience and immersion.

Born in 1860 into a Jewish Alsatian family, Albert Kahn then orchestrated, at the beginning of the 20th century, a unique collection and inventory of the beauty and reality of the world: the Archives of the Planet.

72,000 autochromes, 180,000 meters of cinema film and 4,000 black and white stereoscopic plates will be brought back by a dozen operators, real adventurers of the image sent to more than fifty countries. 

A century later, these images are striking in their color and the intimacy they still exude, the autochrome being the first photographic process in natural color invented in 1903 by the Lumière Brothers.

The films, in black and white, obtained with the help of the Cinématographe also created by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, offer fascinating windows on the state of the world at the beginning of the 20th century, between technical progress, the First World War and the times colonials.

Today, in the Albert Kahn Departmental Museum in Boulogne-Billancourt, these images are revealed in a new museography and spaces entirely redesigned by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, located on the banker's former 4-hectare estate.

In Kahn's time, the premises, resembling a campus, served as a rear base for his philanthropic project focused on an ideal of peace and progress, from foundations to travel grants, from printing to a biology or development laboratory. of movies.

Today, these places serve as a setting for new permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, which offer a unique insight into the work and extraordinary trajectory of this man.

An elusive man in search of light and harmony who will end up ruined by the crisis of 1930, and who will have finally spent all his fortune and his time defending a better knowledge of the world and peoples, in order to guarantee peace and understanding, his great work, his ideal against all odds.

A report by Céline Develay-Mazurelle.

Learn more:

- On the

located in Hauts-de-Seine

- On

, available here in open data

- On

From April 2 to November 13, 2022, this fascinating exhibition captures the journey, the world tour undertaken by Albert Kahn in 1908-1909 to the different representations and imaginations that the journey summons and arouses, through photography and film from the beginning. from the 20th century to the present day.

Newsletter

Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

google-play-badge_FR

• Travel

• Exposure

• France

• Photography

On the same subject

Cultural report

Reopening of the new Albert Kahn museum, "the archives of the planet"

Cultural meeting

The Paris of the Albert-Kahn collections