TitleSienese Countryside
Artist
Wolf Kahn
(1927 - 2020)
Date1963
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 27 1/2 x 39 1/2 in.
Framed: 28 1/2 × 40 3/8 × 1 1/2 in.
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the artist 2006
Object number2006.10
Label TextKnown primarily for his radiant landscapes of trees and New England barns, Wolf Kahn, as a young artist in New York in the 1950s, witnessed the pervasiveness of Abstract Expressionism. Kahn was the fourth child born to a Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany and from a very young age showed artistic promise. He escaped persecution in his home country through the Kindertransport rescue missions, and lived with two separate families in England before soon joining his family in the U.S. Following his graduation from the High School of Music and Art in New York he enlisted in the navy for one year. In 1946 he briefly attended Stuart Davis's classes at the New School before enrolling in the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. The experience would play a seminal role in Kahn's art, and he recalled, "We [the Hofmann students] felt we were learning the essence of modernism, art stripped of everything extraneous. What remained was its esthetic/philosophical foundation, its raison d'être." In the early and mid-1950s Kahn was working in an expressionistic yet representational style that was somewhat indebted to Chaim Soutine. He was included in the Fifth Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at the Stable Gallery in 1955, along with many prominent abstract artists of the decade. During this time Kahn spent his summers in Provincetown with Hofmann and other artists. It would have a lasting effect on him, and he recalled that in 1956 he "was in the midst of changing painting styles, [and] involved that summer in rediscovering pointillism." In December 1956, Kahn joined painter Emily Mason, NA, whom he would soon marry (in March the following year), on a trip to Italy. There multiple influences would take hold, and he was deeply affected by the work of Giorgio Morandi, while his own work became increasingly abstract, more tonal and decidedly less chromatic in its palette. By the early 1960s, soon after he and Mason returned to the States, representation had all but disappeared from his work.
A Fulbright fellowship in 1962 allowed Kahn to return to Italy to paint, and "Sienese Countryside" dates from this period. It is a referential landscape infused with the gestures of the New York School and verges on complete abstraction. During this period of approximately seven or eight years this abstract trend was symptomatic of Kahn's work, and in his own words he was "using the language of abstraction to play my own games." By the mid-1960s, recognizable subject matter and a more varied palette reemerged. Kahn participated in the discourse surrounding abstract versus representational painting at mid-century and was in contact with many of the prominent New York School artists. Even though he has worked representationally for decades, Kahn has noted that the work of abstract painter Mark Rothko encouraged him "to carry the essential idea of radiance . . . into the way I view the problems of landscape."
