Wolf Kahn was a German-American landscape painter. Over his long and prolific career he explored a tension between figurative realism and abstraction, using vibrant colour and energetic brushstrokes to fuse these two often-opposing schools of thought.
Read MoreKahn's paintings and pastel works were often a direct reflection of his immediate environment, and he is known best for capturing the tranquil scenes of the New England countryside.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany to an affluent Jewish family, Kahn grew up surrounded by the arts, and his ability was encouraged by his grandmother from an early age. In 1940, he fled the Nazi regime and emigrated to the United States, where he attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City. Following his graduation, he spent time in the navy and gained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1951.
As a young artist, Kahn trained under the colour field painter Hans Hofmann, becoming his studio assistant and later co-founding the Hansa Gallery in 1952 alongside other former students of Hofmann. The cooperative gallery was hailed as the birthplace of the second generation New York School, and it was here that Kahn had his first solo exhibition and his synthesis of traditional representation and abstract principles began to emerge.
Expansive travel across Europe and the United States with his wife and fellow painter Emily Mason in the ensuing years shaped Kahn's approach to painting, accumulating the light effects and unifying vertical strokes found in nature that remained organising principles throughout his career.
Drawing inspiration from the atmospheric effects of the world around him, Kahn often began his canvases outdoors in the summer and completed them in his New York studio through the autumn and winter months. Working in both oil paint and pastel, his technique could be described as 'scrubbing', with dry gestural lines made across floating veils of pigment. Colour was always his key concern, building from largely monochromatic, muted tones in his early career to the vibrant, almost joyous palette in his signature barn paintings and later works, where he favoured lemon yellow, purple, alizarin crimson, and Pthalo Green.
Following the success of his emergence onto the art scene, Kahn spent several years in Italy, living initially in Venice and then returning to Milan and Rome. This time was characterised by frustration and introspection, but was a turning point in the founding of his approach to landscape painting. In Cypress Rows (1963) he experimented with subdued, heavy daubs of colour with the strong vertical lines of the cypress copses, flattening foreground and background and blurring the boundaries between abstraction with realism, which eventually became a stylistic trademark.
Kahn spent many summers at Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts over the course of his career, where he developed an almost impressionist appreciation of light. Golden Harbor (1966) is swathed in a brilliant yellow glow and signals the beginning of his interest in high-keyed colours, where sky and sea appear to blend. Kahn favoured yellow because of its lack of 'outside connotations', proving the play of formal elements was his primary concern.
At the end of the 1960s, Kahn and Mason bought a summer house in the countryside of Vermont which would become the inspiration for much of his work thereafter. The Red Barn (1970) shows a fusion of his blocks of colour in the solid orange of the barn with the glittering luminosity of his time spent on the water. His work became much larger in scale, as he described his practice as 'doing Rothko over from nature.'
Although figurative, Kahn's works often lack figures and with them a specificity that links them to any time or place. He used his paintings to play visual 'games' with the observer through the means of gestural abstraction as shown in After Glow (1974), which cements Kahn's love of light effects in the brilliant orange sky with the anonymity of the trees below. The landscape itself was a placeholder for Kahn's experimentation with colour.
Suffering macular degeneration in his later years, Kahn adapted his gestural technique, using pastels to create the staccato strokes of branches across his oil-paint coloured backgrounds. He described his preference for verticals as it complemented the natural movement of the arm, as shown in Woodland Density (2019).
Kahn was commissioned to complete portraits for the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York from 1966—1968. In 1970, he executed a commission to paint Litchfield Plantation in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Kahn completed a series of paintings titled The Four Seasons (1985) for AT&T's employees lounge. In 1992, he designed a First Day of Issue postage stamp for the United Nations Philatelic Collection.
Kahn won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1962, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966. In 1979, he was awarded an Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kahn won an American Artist Achievement Award in 1993 and was awarded honorary doctorates from Wheaton College, Union College, and Marlboro College throughout the 2000s. In 2017, Kahn won the International Medal of Arts from the U.S. Department of State.
On Ocula, the artist is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery. Recent exhibitions by this artist at Miles McEnery Gallery include The Last Decade: 2010—2020.
Wolf Kahn has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include Wolf Kahn, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2019); Wolf Kahn: Density & Transparency, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Vermont (2017); and Six Decades, Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York (2014).
Group exhibitions include 40—4—40, Celebrating our 40th Anniversary, Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington D.C. (2021); The Mid Century Modern Aesthetic, Alpha 137 Gallery, New York (2021); Spring Group Exhibition, Cavalier Gallery, New York (2016); Annual Small Works Exhibition, Cavalier Gallery, New York (2014); and Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (2014).
Wolf Kahn's website can be found here.
Annie Curtis | Ocula | 2021
