Memories help form portrait of a painter
Wolf Kahn’s studio is a magenta-and-yellow explosion. Brightly colored paintings are hanging on the walls, propped up in corners, piled high on the floors. It’s the last thing you’d expect to find on the top floor of an industrial building on a nondescript Manhattan side street.
This cluttered oasis of color is where Kahn, AB’50, continues to build an artistic career that has combined intellectual exploration with minute attention to the details of his craft. He came to the College hoping to become a scholar of aesthetics and “bring Kant up to date.” But his experience as a painter convinced him that theory can be a distraction to the working artist.
“When I paint, all I think about is one brush stroke after another,” Kahn says. “To deal with categories, what’s going on in the art world, what the critics say, I think that’s wrong.”
His practicality sometimes comes through in his choice of subjects. From his studio windows, a visitor can peer up to see the top of the Empire State Building, a view that figures in several of his recent paintings. “Look!” he says, smiling puckishly. “There’s my model!”
Working From Memory
Not that Kahn spends much time looking out of his studio windows. He works from memory, not life, and his subject matter normally runs more to New England barns than New York skyscrapers. In his paintings the American landscape is rendered in high-key colors that recall the luminous palette of Pierre Bonnard, whose influence Kahn happily acknowledges. Nor is there anything literal about his landscapes.
One of the best-known pupils of Hans Hofmann, the Abstract Expressionist master who was as admired a teacher as he was a painter, Kahn passes his memories of the visible world through the transforming prism of abstraction.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Kahn fled the country with his family at the start of World War II. After a short time serving in the U.S. Navy, he used the G.I. Bill to enroll at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where he briefly lost his confidence as an artist.
“For the first time in my life, I was in the company of my peers and betters, guys who’d gone through the war,” Kahn says. “I wasn’t used to dealing with people who knew more about life and art than I did.”
Determined to try a different path, Kahn used his remaining G.I. benefits to enroll in the College. He collected his undergraduate degree after eight months of intensive study—“one of the best years of my life.” It was a watershed period that he says taught him lasting lessons, including a richer understanding of how to judge art.
“Back then the whole school was divided into logical positivists and neo-Platonists, and they hardly spoke to each other,” Kahn says. “I was a neo-Platonist and still am. I think that the idea of a sense of beauty is inherent in each individual, though it varies from individual to individual. A feeling that something is right and something else not right.”
The Artist as Writer
Gaining that perspective may not have directly aided Kahn’s craft as a painter, but he says it made him a better artist.
“An artist profits from a liberal education,” Kahn says. “You learn critical thinking—not to get swept away by the marketplace. And you learn how to write. Nowadays an artist has to be his own promoter, his own spokesman, and you have to use nontechnical language in order to make art sound as interesting as baseball. Otherwise you won’t get anywhere.”
Many painters have little to say that can’t be said with a brush. The soft-spoken Kahn is both a blunt, funny raconteur and a talented writer. In his 2003 volume Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels, Kahn describes the places that inspired a hundred of his paintings and pastels.
Kahn says his ability to keep pursuing art full-time at age 81 makes him “one of the fortunate people of the world.”
“I love this studio,” he says. “I spend 10 hours a day here, seven days a week—I really am a workaholic. People ask me where I go for a vacation, and I say, ‘My whole life’s a vacation.’”
By Terry Teachout, courtesy of The Core
