Wolf Kahn: Taking Color to the Danger Point

SPI’s Conversation with the Renowned Colorist Wolf Kahn

Wolf Kahn (1927 - 2020) was a German-American original through and through. Born in Stuttgart, Germany on October 4, 1927, Wolf’s mother abandoned the family when he was a young boy. Shortly after, his father, who was the conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic, married a woman who made it abundantly clear that she did not like having a young child in the house. So with little fanfare, Wolf was sent to live with his grandparents in Frankfurt. As he tells it, they doted on him and gave him, he recalls in his SPI recording, “lots of drawing material.” But his happiness with his grandparents was short-lived. At the age of 12, with Nazism on the rise, he was sent to England as part of the kinder transport program. His host family in England treated him as a servant. In 1940, Wolf traveled alone to New York. Although there was no one there to meet him upon his arrival, he eventually reunited with his father and stepmother.

Wolf never saw his grandparents again.

Given his childhood, I suggested to him that many would have been broken by the experiences that he had as a young boy, and, I asked, “Do you feel that you have a strong inner core?” Wolf waved me off like I was talking nonsense. So that conversation thread, as it never developed, is not included in the recording. Perhaps it should have been. So much was said in the wave of his hand. And I maintain that, while he had the eye, soul, and heart of an artist, Wolf had a backbone of the toughest kind of steel.

After arriving in the States, he attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City and then continued his studies at the Hans Hofmann School, becoming Hofmann's studio assistant. After two years of training under Hofmann, Wolf gave up on art. He had what Hofmann diagnosed as “mental indigestion.” Wolf moved to Chicago, where he received a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Chicago. From there, after researching what were the highest-paying unskilled jobs, he moved to the Pacific Northwest and became a lumberjack. The work, he relates, cleared his head, and he returned to New York where, again, he took up painting.

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 Artnet, “I am always trying to get to the danger point, where color either becomes too sweet or too harsh; too noisy or too quiet,” he said of his approach to painting.

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."

Wolf received numerous 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.

To listen to Wolf’s SPI recording, go to Arts/ Painters/ Wolf Kahn, or click here.

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