Kahn, Wolf

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927 to a Jewish family. His father was a prominent musician who lost his job during the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s, pushing the family to move to the United States. Kahn was sent to live with his grandmother in Frankfurt, where he began drawing. At age twelve, he was sent to live with a host family in England until he eventually reunited with his family in New York City in 1940. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art, he spent a year in the U.S. Navy. With the help of the GI bill, Kahn studied Abstract Expressionism at the Hans Hofmann School and graduated from the University of Chicago shortly after.

Kahn co-founded the Hansa Gallery with other former Hofmann students. At the Gallery he had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, Kahn joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he remained until 1995. His work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and others. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

Kahn’s work often depicts landscapes and other aspects of nature, usually with his trademark groups of trees, mostly working with pastel and oil. His landscapes apply an evocative, vibrant blend of Realism, Impressionism, and Color Field painting. His works demonstrate the influence of the variety of artist with whom he worked throughout his career, including impressionists, modernists, and abstract artists, to create a style wholly unique and identifiable as his.