THE FOREST FOR THE TREES: WOLF KAHN

4 Apr - 18 May 2025

WOLF KAHN
THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
The preeminent colorist of a generation, it is impossible to understate Wolf Kahn’s role as a maverick, a painter who swam against the tides of his time. 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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In the Back of the Vermont Studio Center, 2001

Oil on canvas

52 x 66 inches

A one-time lumberjack in his youth, Wolf Kahn’s enthusiasm for trees as subject matter resounds throughout this exhibition. Throughout his life, Kahn sought to translate landscapes, most often the heavily treed forested hills and valleys of the American Northeast, into light and color. Sometimes painterly, sometimes punctuated and jabbing, the viewer is brought into each brightly hued copse of trees and is captivated.
The trees themselves in Wolf Kahn’s paintings, however, differ radically in execution. Large swaths of color create the impression of a treed ridge in one painting; a chaotic tangle of vegetation brings the viewer into a weblike cobble of sunlit branches in the next. Trees become variegated vertical lines and branches short, terse horizontal stabs of color. This exhibition presents a varied curation of large and small paintings that shows Kahn’s breadth as a painter of trees.
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On the Bank of the Gihon River, 2005
Oil on canvas
40 x 42 inches
Scene in Hawaii, 2006

Pastel on paper

29 x 41 inches

Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, Wolf Kahn fled Nazi Germany to Britain through the Kindertransport in the late 1930s. He eventually settled in the United States, where he completed high school and enrolled in the Navy. Following his service, he studied with the legendary teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, before becoming his studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled at the University of Chicago and completed his Bachelor of Arts degree within one year. In 1957, Kahn married artist Emily Mason. The pair lived and worked between New York City and West Brattleboro, VT. In March 2020, Wolf Kahn passed away at the age of 92 in New York, NY.
Wolf Kahn’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums throughout North America. He was the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Medal of Arts from the State Department.

His work is held in important museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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