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Perhaps the preeminent colorist of a generation, Wolf Kahn descends from an amalgam of enigmatic artistic sources including American Realism, Color Field painting, and Abstract Expressionism. It’s clear he always made his own rules, and perhaps as a rule, broke them. A second-generation New School artist following the lions of American Abstraction such as Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning, among others, Wolf Kahn broke rank by returning to representational painting, mainly of landscapes.
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Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, Wolf Kahn fled at thirteen to London via the Kindertransport, and thereon to the United States, where he was eventually reunited with his father, a well-known conductor of the orchestra. 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 Hofmann, becoming Hofmann's studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago as part of the Hutchins Chicago Plan, graduating after only eight months.
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Wolf Kahn, Down to the Apple Orchard, 2006
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Wolf Kahn, House Across the Meadow, 2013
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Country Studio, 2010Oil on canvas18 x 22 inches
Framed dimensions 19 x 22 3/4 inchesSold
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He returned to New York, determined to become a full-time artist. He and other former Hofmann students established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery where Kahn had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. In 1960, his work was included in a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art titled Young America 1960: 30 Painters under 36. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His work found in the permanent collections of most major art museums in the United States including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of America Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In addition, Kahn’s works regularly form the centerpiece of numerous group exhibitions and solo shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States and abroad.
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SELECTED WORKS (1983 - 2016): WOLF KAHN
Past viewing_room
