Wolf Kahn - Hardcover

Spring, Justin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810963221 ISBN 13: 9780810963221

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 1996

Synopsis

In the 1950s and 1960s a group of young artists forged a fresh, representational art that made use of the Abstract Expressionists' spontaneous brushwork and brilliant colour to document the world. One of the leaders of this group, Wolf Kahn, specialized in landscape painting, which he has developed over the last 40 years. This book aims to demonstrate how his use of colour has placed him at the forefront of American representational art. The text presents an overview of Kahn's life and career - his childhood in Germany, his study at the Hans Hofman school, his early success as a latter-day Expressionist, and his ten years as a painter of austere, tonalist canvases, before he turned to the luminous landscapes that established his reputation. There is also an analytical essay by the painter and critic Louis Finkelstein which discusses the origins and value of Kahn's fusion of abstraction and representation.

About this title

About the Author:

Justin Spring is a novelist and art critic. His work has been published in Art Forum, the New York Times, and the Village Voice. Karen Wilkin is a curator and critic. She is a contributor to the New Criterion, Art in America, and the Wall Street Journal. The late Louis Finkelstein, artist and critic, was a professor emeritus at Queens College, City University of New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

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.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0810963221
• ISBN 13: 9780810963221
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164