Wolf Kahn - Artist Page
Wolf Kahn
Wolf Kahn, Brilliant Green Trees, 1997, Oil on canvas, 18" x 22"
Mr. Kahn, who emigrated from Germany as a child, studied with the influential artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, who had himself emigrated from Germany, and in 1952 he was among several former Hofmann students who organized the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative named for their teacher. Mr. Kahn had his first solo show there in 1953, a collection of indoor and outdoor scenes, and made a strong impression.
“The paint spills and runs,” The New York Times wrote of that show, “color crackles with vivacity and the brush might just as well have been guided by a tornado as by hand. Yet this is no manner for manner’s sake. Kahn is a high-spirited, lyrical artist who paints the way he does because a leonine manner seems to fit exactly his response to what he sees.”
It was the first of many solo exhibitions, in New York and around the country. Mr. Kahn came to focus on landscapes, especially once he and Ms. Mason bought a hillside farm in Vermont in 1968. They would spend summers and falls there, and Mr. Kahn found inspiration in the bucolic scenes.
“I am attracted by the light, by the shifting horizons, by the variety and gentleness of the landscapes,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1983, when he had his first major West Coast solo exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art.
His works seemed to radiate light, an intensity created by building up layers with intensive brushwork. The luminosity could be simultaneously comforting and assertive.
“It’s the idea of the iron fist in the velvet glove,” he said. “I want maximum strength along with maximum delicacy.”