Background
Wolf Kahn was born on October 4, 1927 in Stuttgart, Germany. He is a son of Emil Kahn, a conductor, and Nellie (Budge) Kahn. In 1940, Wolf arrived in the United States and six years later, in 1946, he became a United States citizen.
1083 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128, United States
National Academy of Design
443-465 West 135th Street, New York, NY, United States
High School of Music & Art
72 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, United States
New School
5801 South Ellis Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637, United States
University of Chicago
633 West 155 Street, New York, NY 10032, United States
American Academy of Arts and Letters
2000 Carleton Street, Berkeley CA 94720-2284, United States
University of California, Berkeley
New York City, New York, United States
Cooper Union School of Art
Wolf Kahn was born on October 4, 1927 in Stuttgart, Germany. He is a son of Emil Kahn, a conductor, and Nellie (Budge) Kahn. In 1940, Wolf arrived in the United States and six years later, in 1946, he became a United States citizen.
During the period from 1942 to 1945, Wolf studied at High School of Music & Art in New York after which he spent time in the Navy. Some time later, Kahn attended the New School, New York, where he studied painting under the guidance of Stuart Davis.
Also, in 1947, Wolf attended Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where he remained till 1949, when he enrolled at the University of Chicago. In 1951, Kahn graduated from the university with Bachelor of Arts degree.
In 1962, he was the recipient of Fulbright Scholarship. The painter received several honorary degrees from such educational institutions, as Wheaton College in 2002 and Union College, Schenectady, in 2004.
In 1947, Wolf started his career as Hans Hofmann's assistant in his studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts. During that time, Wolf and other former Hofmann's students established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery, where Kahn had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, the painter started to collaborate with Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. In 1968, Wolf bought a farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont, where he began producing a number of exceptional barn paintings.
In 1960, he served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1961, Wolf was appointed an adjunct associate professor at Cooper Union School of Art, a position he held till 1977.
After a brief phase in the early 1960's, when Kahn was inspired by a minimalist technique, he revisited the bold colors and representational elements of his earlier style in the mature works of the 1970's and 1980's. More recently, Kahn turned his focus entirely to nature, depicting ponds, rivers and forests.
In 2005, the Smithsonian Art Collectors Program commissioned Kahn to produce a print to benefit the cultural and educational programs of the Smithsonian Associates. The screen print, entitled "Aura", hangs in the S. Dillon Ripley Center in the National Mall. In 2017, Wolf Kahn exhibited more than fifty recent paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery.
During his lifetime, the painter visited many countries, such as Mexico, Italy, Greece, Kenya, New Mexico, Egypt and others, where he painted his landscapes. Currently, he divides his time between New York and Brattleboro, Vermont.
Quotations:
"The artist’s alertness to the coloristic demands of each picture, the ability to respond to the picture’s needs, to feed the color until its appetite is satiated; these are the true measures of a colorist’s talent."
"People mistakenly think that art is about nature, or about an artists feelings about nature. It is instead a path of enlightenment and pleasure, one of many paths, where nature and the artists feelings are merely raw material."
"Keep the childlike vision and remain true to your ideas."
"There are many prejudices about art, and first among them is that it is a skill and that there are definite rules."
"I'm always trying to get to a danger point in color, where color either becomes too sweet or it becomes too harsh, it becomes too noisy or too quiet, and at that point I still want the picture to be strong, forceful, and the carrier of everything that a painting has to have: contrast, drama, austerity."
"I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I've accomplished something useful."
"To be a landscape painter is to be a perverse individual."
Quotes from others about the person
"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 and 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." — James Yohe
Wolf Kahn married Emily Mason, a painter, on March 2, 1957. Their marriage produced two children — Cecily and Melany.