| Wolf Kahn | ||
| Birth Date: October 4, 1927 |
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| Death Date: March 15, 2020 Artist Gallery |
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| Wolf Kahn, the youngest of four siblings, was born into a well-to-do artistic family. His father was the conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic Symphony, and his mother came from a family of art collectors. During 1938, Kahn took his first art lessons, but most of his initial drawings were of military or historical events. The next year Kahn’s parents sent him to England for safety as Hitler was coming to power, and in 1940, he immigrated to the United States.
In 1942, he entered New York's High School of Music and Art, and while there, he was employed by a commercial art firm doing illustrations. After a stint in the Navy, Kahn entered Hans Hofmann's school. Kahn first worked with a dark palette and abstract forms, and although Hofmann's style of teaching was difficult, Kahn has consistently praised him for teaching him the value of control and understanding. Kahn's first exhibition was a 1951 group show in a loft with several other artists in lower Manhattan. From this impromptu show, a group effort evolved called the Hansa Gallery Cooperative. In 1953, Wolf Kahn had a one-man show at this gallery, which was reviewed by Fairfield Porter, and at this his use of bolder, more vivid colors began to appear in his work. By the mid-1950's, on a summer trip to Provincetown, Kahn's paintings indicated a new direction of softening warm colors. He was included in Meyer Shapiro's seminal exhibition, The New York School: The Second Generation at the Jewish Museum, and by the end of the 1950s, he had developed his abstracted landscape style for which he is best known.
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