Walter und Hans (Platingummidruck)

Platingummidruck variant of the celebrated 1906 double portrait of Kühn's sons Walter and Hans, this print is the canonical example of the gum-over-platinum process that Dr. Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944), Austrian-German pictorialist and trained physician, invented in his Innsbruck atelier. Kühn first laid down a platinum-palladium image, then overprinted one or more layers of gum bichromate in pigment, fusing the cool tonal precision and archival permanence of platinum with the painterly mass and chromatic depth of gum. Held by Galerie Maier in Innsbruck, this version differs from the single-process Walter and Hans Kühn print at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: where the MoMA sheet is pure pigment on paper, the Platingummidruck reveals a luminous platinum substructure beneath the gum layers, a hallmark of the technique and the proof that Kühn's contribution was a synthesis rather than a mere variation. As a co-founder of the Wiener Kleeblatt (Vienna Trifolium) with Hans Watzek and Hugo Henneberg, and a close correspondent of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Kühn used such hybrid prints to argue that photography could rival painting on its own terms. Stieglitz published Kühn in Camera Work pl. 18 (1905) and pl. 33 (1911), cementing his international standing. Process Transposition Maison Picturale: the Platingummidruck is transposed via platinum-palladium MP printing overlaid with an Aquaprint MP layer (Maison Picturale's non-toxic Vision Picturale gum bichromate reformulation), preserving the dual-layer logic of Kühn's invention without the historical dichromate hazard. This work is studied at the Maison Picturale Paris atelier as the reference case for layered platinum-and-pigment printing. Kühn entered the public domain in 2015.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)