Wolf Kahn

Austere in design, American painter Wolf Kahn's landscapes, pure constructions of color and light, evoke a world of timeless beauty. In this exceptionally attractive monograph featuring 100 color plates, art critic and novelist Spring traces Kahn's wildly exuberant experimentation in an informal chronicle based on interviews with the artist and his associates. Born in 1927 in Germany to a Jewish orchestra conductor and a mother who died in a sanatorium when he was five, Kahn was shipped to England in 1939 and was reunited with his father in the U.S. one year later. In the late 1940s, Kahn studied with abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, a purist for whom art was a sacred calling. Absorbing the lessons of Van Gogh and Pierre Bonnard, he achieved in his mature work an original vision concerned with the direct, sensual experience of color. His serene late pictures of woods and sunsets radiate an air of spiritual transcendence. Painter/critic Finkelstein illuminates the dialogue between abstraction and representation in Kahn's work. (Oct.)