Wolf Kahn

Working within a predominantly abstractionist context, a group of younger artists forged a mode of representational* art in the 1950s and 1960s that made use of Abstract Expressionist* painterly freedom and spontaneity in order to document the life around them. However, subject matter, including human figures, was recognizable, which was much against the grain of most of their peers.

Wolf Kahn, one of the leaders of this group and a native of Stuttgart, Germany, directed this approach toward the painting of the landscape, which he has steadfastly developed over a period of forty years. With studios in New York and Vermont, he has been a colorist* who uses simplified geometric designs and contrasting, carefully balanced colors. He has a fascination with barns that date to 1966 when he did a work titled First Barn Painting. He returned to this subject throughout the 70s and 80s. In 1999, a major exhibition of his work was held at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta Georgia.

Today Kahn's use of color has placed him at the forefront of American representational Art, and has made him one of the most highly regarded colorists working in America today. He has received Fulbright and Guggenheim* Fellowships, and an Award in Art from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters.

Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, Wolf Kahn immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940. In 1945 he graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill he studied with the well-known teacher and abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman, becoming Hofmann's studio assistant. In 1950 he enrolled in the University of Chicago from which he graduated in 1951 with a BA.

Having completed his baccalaureate degree in only one year, Kahn was determined to become a professional artist. He and other former Hofmann students established The Hansa, a cooperative gallery where he had his first one man show. In 1956 he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Mr. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a member of the Nation Academy of Design, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has recently completed an appointment to the New York City Art Commission. Traveling extensively, he has painted landscapes in such diverse locales as Maine, Mexico, Italy, Greece, Kenya, New Mexico, Hawaii and Egypt. He spends his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, which he and his wife, the painter Emily Mason, have owned since 1968. They have two daughters, Cecily and Melany. Cecily Kahn is a painter, married to the painter David Kapp.

The unique blend of Realism and the formal discipline of Color Field painting sets the work of Wolf Kahn apart. Kahn is an artist who embodies the synthesis of his modern abstract training with Hans Hofmann, with the palette of Matisse, Rothko's sweeping bands of color, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. It is precisely this fusion of color, spontaneity and representation that has produced such a rich and expressive body of work. Wolf Kahn regularly exhibits at galleries and museums across North America. Selected museum collections include Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Wolf Kahn, the youngest of four siblings, was born into a well-to-do artistic family. His father was the conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic Symphony, and his mother came from a family of art collectors.(1) During 1938, Kahn took his first art lessons, but most of his initial drawings were of military or historical events. The next year Kahn was sent to England for safety following the ascendancy of Hitler to power, and in 1940, he immigrated to the United States.

In 1942, he entered New York’s High School of Music and Art, and while there, he was employed by a commercial art firm doing illustrations. After a stint in the Navy, Kahn entered Hans Hofmann’s school, and among his fellow students were Neil Blaine, Jane Freilicher, Allan Kaprow and Larry Rivers. His initial results were done with a dark palette and abstracted forms, and although Hofmann’s style of teaching was difficult, Kahn has consistently praised him for teaching him the value of control and understanding.(2) Kahn’s first exhibition was a 1951 group show in a loft with several other artists in lower Manhattan. From this impromptu show, a group effort evolved called the Hansa Gallery Cooperative.(3) In 1953, Wolf Kahn had a one-man show at this gallery, which was reviewed by Fairfield Porter, and at this same time bolder, more vivid colors began to appear in his work. By the mid-1950’s, on a summer trip to Provincetown, Kahn’s paintings indicated a new direction of softening warm colors in the manner of Bonnard. He was included in Meyer Shapiro’s seminal exhibition, The New York School: The Second Generation at the Jewish Museum, and by the end of the 1950s, he had developed his abstracted landscape style for which he is best known.

In 1966, he made his first “barn” painting on Martha’s Vineyard that reduced the complexities of detail of the architecture to a more basic shape, a stylistic convention that is evident in the Museum’s painting. Kahn has since commented frequently on his use of color as a unique and specific component of each work as the situation demands, where the gradual buildup of the colors resembles the beauty and translucent nature of pastels.(4) Since then Kahn has had one-person exhibitions at the Kansas City Art Institute, Chrysler Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum, among others. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums throughout the United States.