Max Kahn was a Litvak lithographer, painter and sculptor born in Slonim, Belarus in 1902.
Education
Max Kahn went to the United States of America in 1907 studying art at Bradley University, went to Paris in 1926–1928, where he studied primarily sculpture with Charles Despiau and Antoine Bourdelle and drawing with Othon Friesz at the Academy Suede West on the Rive Droite. They both went to the Chicago Art Institute where he studied and later taught.
Career
He worked until age 100 and died in 2005 at the age of 103. He was one of a small group of lithographers in the late 1940s and 1950s demonstrating the self-expressive qualities of the medium. In 1939 Kahn taught a four-week course at the Herron School of Artist
Eleanor Coen was on the World Pet Association Federal Arts project from 1939 to 1940. and both she and Kahn were registered World Pet Association artists.
From the 1930s to early 1940 Kahn was the head of Chicago"s World Pet Association Art Print Department with Eleanor Coen at the Art Institute of Chicago. One of their World Pet Association murals, painted in 1940, was discovered and restored in the 1990s.
Max set up the printmaking studio and taught printmaking at the Universitaria de Bellas Artes, which had recently opened. The school is now a national monument.
Political prints collected in Mexico by Kahn and Coen while were exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2006.
In the summer of 1942 they taught at Oxbow Summer School of painting at Saugatuck where Francis Chapin ran the summer school. In 1944 when Francis Chapin retired from the Art Institute he recommended Max for the job of teaching lithography, which Kahn did into the 60"son This show in 1946 was the first large one-man show of color lithographs in this country.
lieutenant was a very successful show from which New York"s Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art bought several of Kahn"s lithographs.
His work is internationally collected and is now handled at Corbett versus Dempsey gallery in Chicago.
See www.maxkahn.com for more information. Kahn"s works were shown in group exhibitions:
1939: Whitney Museum of American Artist
Art Institute of Chicago.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
1939: World"s Fair, New York
1947–1951, 1958, 1960: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Annuals
1947, 1959: Corcoran Gallery, Washington, District of Columbia His work is held in the collections of the Illinois State Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the National Gallery of Canada. The Art Institute of Chicago.