Wolf Kahn (1927 - 2020) was born in Stuttgart, Germany on October 4, 1927. He fled Nazi Germany at the age of 12 as part of the kinder transport and moved to the United States in 1940. Kahn attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City. He continued his studies at the Hans Hofmann School, becoming Hofmann's studio assistant. After two years of training under Hofmann, Kahn moved to Chicago, where he received a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Chicago.
Influenced by Hofmann's use of nature as the starting point for a painting, Kahn's work encompasses pictorial landscape and painterly abstraction. Converging color and light to create atmospheric and sensual visual fields, his paintings evoke the ethereal world of nature even when they are non-representational.
From his SPI recording:
"What I really believe in is the eye. I think you've got to get the mind sort of out of the way and trust that the eye will do things far more comprehensively and more interestingly, certainly, than what you can think about. So I always try to get my painting to the point where the painting speaks to me, rather than me speaking to the painting. I have a feeling at that point, you get in touch with things that are truly interesting and truly mean something because you're beyond convention, what have you, you know, and normalcy. I'm against normalcy. I try to get beyond intention."
Kahn has received honors such as the Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums, including the National Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
