Artist: Wolf Kahn - Paintings & Pastels

Wolf Kahn - Beaver Dam

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Wolf Kahn (b. 1927) is widely regarded as one of America's most prominent and influential landscape painters. An intense involvement with light and color dominates his paintings, and redefines the world of nature. Subject matter is used as a testing ground for Kahn's concepts of color, organization and structure. His startling palette is responsible in large part for the power of his work. The paintings are often grand in scale, yet the tonalities may be soft luminous hues. At other times the works are blunt and bold with colors that vibrate in intensity.

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart Germany and immigrated to the United States in 1940. In the late 1940’s he studied painting at the famous Hans Hofmann school in New York – a breeding ground for ambitious painters. Together with such artists as Fairfield Porter, Elaine de Kooning and Larry Rivers, Wolf Kahn in the 1950’s emerged as a member of the representational wing of a wave of abstract expressionism. His art continued to evolve and by the late 1960’s had emerged into fully chromatic mature works.

Kahn's paintings today offer a successful resolution of the language of abstraction together with a perception of landscape. They are the contemporary manifestation of a long tradition of American painting that runs from George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder in the nineteenth century through Milton Avery and Mark Rothko in the twentieth century.