WOLF KAHN
Reaching Up and Bearing Down
LewAllenGalleries
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Wolf Kahn Reaching Up and Bearing Down
July 20 - August 26.2018 Opening Reception Friday, July 27
LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com
cover: A Light Blue Sky (detail), 2006, pastel on paper, 30" x 40"
Wolf Kahn
Reaching Up and Bearing Down
Although Kahn is best known for his oil painting, knowledgeable collectors particularly prize his work in pastel, an opulent medium that has offered the artist a rich, expressive vehicle for his eloquent technique. — BARBARA NOVAK, Noted art historian and author of the introduction to Wolf Kahn Pastels, a major monograph published by Harry N. Abrams in 2000 Now in his 91st year, Wolf Kahn is regarded as one of the leading figures of American contemporary art. He is widely acclaimed as a virtuosic master of color, light, texture, and calligraphic line that he combines to form an extraordinary expressive language of abstracted landscape. Consisting of work that spans more than 43 years of Kahn’s long career, Reaching Up and Bearing Down is a unique exhibition that, in addition to oil paintings, features 21 never-before-seen large format pastel works. Kahn calls pastel his “determining medium” that influences how he works with everything else in his oeuvre, including oil paint. He considers pastel to be foundational and says it connects him to his painting and other work. These 21 dramatic pastels were put aside by the artist and are being exhibited here for the first time. As iconic examples of breathtaking, classic Kahn artworks created over several decades, these pastels provide fascinating insight into Kahn’s artistic development and as a master of the liminal space between representation and abstraction. As such, they form the centerpiece of this major show. This exhibition demonstrates Kahn’s virtuosity in blending landscape with the abstract principles of color field painting, which combine to make him one of the most distinctive visual interpreters of the land. Inclusion of the striking group of large pastels demonstrates the artist’s fluency with a medium he describes as one of “immediacy” and one that allows him to make the most direct recordation of his experience of being in nature. The medium offers a sumptuous tactility that in Kahn’s hands elevates color, line and form to sensuous extravagance. The works in this show reveal the artist’s remarkable capacity to express serendipitously the unabashed beauty of landscape. Kahn says pastels are like “dust on butterfly wings,” imparting to these works a lightness of being and a special contemporaneous sense of authenticity of his having been in a place. Mara Williams, Chief Curator of the Brattleboro Museum, notes that “the mark a pastel stick makes, the way its powder sits on the page, its texture, its effects are the genesis of [Kahn’s] painting style. His virtuosic handling of the medium...informs and expands all his artistic endeavors.” The artist himself refers to 2
pastel as “the milkiness of the haze over Venice, or the velvet darkness of a barn’s interior seen through open doors on a brilliant summer day.” Central to Kahn’s artistic vision is the expressive interplay of broadly ranging and glowing color combinations, evocative form, calligraphic line, and resplendent light, calling to mind – from the ways Kahn brilliantly orchestrates them – the intangible, felt sensations of landscape. The subjects Kahn references in paint and pastel – landscapes, trees, hillsides, pastures, streams, barns, sky – are not depicted for their own sake, but resonate with deeper feelings about nature beneath the surface of their appearance. They radiate the very soul of the land. Their direct evocation of the land’s power to exalt prompted mid-century New York poet and art critic Frank O’Hara to describe Kahn’s landscapes this way: “They have the pleasure of a scream from a well-trained soprano.” Transcending time and place, Kahn’s paintings and pastels manifest his core belief that “art exists to celebrate, exalt, excite, and satisfy the demands of the visual.” It uniquely inspires imagination and memory in others: nature as the source and sustainer of life; the land as that which is eternal, connecting past, present and future; and the world as a place full of sustaining beauty, no matter the turmoil that otherwise exists. As the title Reaching Up and Bearing Down suggests, Wolf Kahn has written that one of the many contrasting elements within his art is the sense both of reaching up and of bearing down: his trees both weighed down by the grasp of their roots and simultaneously stretching upwards towards the sky. Horizons and trees have been enduring elements of inspiration for Kahn and he has said “I believe that we can always look at the sky and the ground, and derive meaning and pleasure from the enterprise.” Kahn perceives his creative work similar to that of a dancer, whose art occurs both in her movement upward and the nimble weight of her body on the points of her feet. As such, Kahn’s art exhibits a mixture of unexpected but gracefully combined contradictions and contrasts. “In one’s highest aspirations,” Kahn writes, “one must still keep one’s feet on the ground.” His paintings and pastels resonate this simultaneity of suggestiveness rooted in reductive presentation of the essential but evincing a fascination that soars on the wings of wonder and imagination. Their effect is both entrancing and meditative. The sense of quietude and stillness in the work – what Kahn calls “radiance” – confers a timelessness to their appeal and an enduring quality of beauty that one never tires of being with. As the pastels and paintings in this exhibition reveal, Kahn is an artist whose curiosity and insatiable appetite for new ways of expression inspires constant innovation. With his deep connections to pivotal figures in post-war American art (such as Hans Hofmann with whom he studied and worked as a studio assistant in the ‘50s) and his deep admiration of modern masters such as Mark Rothko, Pierre Bonnard, and Giorgio Morandi, as well as American landscape painter forebears such as Albert Pinkham Ryder and George Inness, Kahn places high value on artistic tradition. But this exhibition also demonstrates 3
his resolute belief that art should be a continual exploration, that “the tried and true needs constant questioning, revision and expansion, [and that] elements which have been pondered over a period of time gain resonance and depth.” The selection of pastels included in the exhibition offers further insight into Kahn’s transcendent artistic impulse. Prized among his oeuvre for the inherent textural richness of the medium, they stand as intimate conduits for Kahn’s eloquent technique and style. Rather than being predicable replicas of particular scenes, there is in Kahn’s pastels, as well as his paintings, a tantalizing sense of mystery creating delightfully disruptive suggestiveness that becomes transportive. Kahn often views the content of landscape in a broad way, what he calls “an image devoid of incident.” Though not a goal in itself, he says that “simplicity is a surprise gift” in his work. As Kahn seeks to express honesty in his pastels and painting, his drive to discover the proper relationships between scale, density, texture and the expression of coherence between them, leads him to empty out the non-essential. Objects are often reduced to evocative essences: vivacious color replaces tedious detail in suggesting ideas of a place – and gestural marks say vastly more about forms and shapes than finicky verisimilitude. With his unique use of color, light and form, Kahn’s visual language inspires the viewer to move from static observation to active imagination in ways not usually possible with topographical replication. His unique expressive response to being in a place enables his audience to experience a personal sense of being there too. Furthermore, his pastels act as a window into his artistic sensibility: they take on a visceral, drawn quality that more directly reveals the gesture of the artist’s hand and arm as he lays down his lines and shapes. This tactile quality also draws our attention more closely to the surface, and in turn, bends our visual sense of the landscape even further from specificity towards a transcendent sense of spiritual abstraction. Kahn’s long career has brought him critical acclaim and an impressive resume of leading private and museum collections across North America. Born in Germany in 1929, Kahn escaped the Nazis by immigrating first to England in 1939 and then to the United States in 1940. In the 1950s, after study and work with Hans Hofmann, Kahn led a generation of artists in New York City that sought to reconcile the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field movements with traditional representational art. In contrast to the then-prevailing view in the art world that subject matter was unimportant to an artwork’s composition, Kahn sought to break down the idea that subject, composition, and color were mutually exclusive. Still actively working, Kahn lives in New York City and has spent many summers and autumns in 4
Vermont on a hillside farm, which he and his wife, the painter Emily Mason (also represented by LewAllen Galleries), have owned since 1968. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the U.S. State Department Medal of Art. Kenneth R. Marvel
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Red Floor, 1956, oil on canvas, 42 x 48 in
Edge of a Swamp, 1975, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
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Intertwined Trees, 2010, pastel on paper, 29 x 41 in
Strong Green, Strong Pink, 2009, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
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Spots of Pink, 2009, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
A Purple World, 2010, pastel on paper, 30 x 40 in
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Exercise in Green, 1976, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
Scene in Hawaii, 2006, pastel on paper, 29 x 41 in
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Light and Bright, 2007-08, pastel on paper, 29 x 41 in
Maine, Dark Water, 1986, pastel on paper, 30 x 40 in
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Many Blue Trunks, One Black One, 2006, pastel on paper, 29 x 41 in
Maine, 1986, pastel on paper, 30 x 40 in
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Tracks by the River, 1975, pastel on paper , 30 x 40 in
Pond Near the Studio, 2005, pastel on paper, 29 x 41 in
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Planted Uphill, 1975, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
Toward Westmoreland, 1986, pastel on paper, 30.5 x 44 in
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Early May in Vermont, 1986, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
Sunny Side and Shadowed Side, 2009, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
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Small Brook on Large Paper, 1978, pastel on paper, 30 x 40 in
Broad Ochre Stripe, 2009, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
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Dark Purple, Dark Green, 2005, pastel on paper, 29 x 41 in
Barn with Blue Shadows, 1984, pastel on paper, 30 x 44 in
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Blue Barn, 1975, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 in
Lucy Bump's Riding Ring, 1981, oil on canvas, 21 x 39 in
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In South Harpswell, Maine, 1982, oil on canvas, 20 x 25 in
Pines Against Evening Sky, 1996, oil on canvas, 26 x 32 in
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Old Mill, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in
Untitled, 1984, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in
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The Airstrip in November, 1982, oil on canvas, 22 x 34 in
Ben's Pond, Midsummer, 1982, oil on canvas, 28 x 40 in
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Two Farm Buildings and a Pond, 1989, oil on canvas, 40 x 52 in
Large River Bend, 1984, oil on canvas, 53 x 84 in
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Barn in a Summer Haze, 1984, oil on canvas, 36 x 52 in
Beaver Swamp in Autumn, 1975, oil on canvas, 25.3 x 19.3 in
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Mount Pinotubo Sunset, 1993, lithograph in eight colors on white paper, 22.25 x 30.25 in
Wolf Kahn b. 1927, Stuttgart, Germany EDUCATION 1951 Bachelor of Arts, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1947 Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC 2018 Reaching Up and Bearing Down, LewAllen Galleries, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL Santa Fe, NM Boston Museum of Fine arts, Boston, MA 2017 Light and Color, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY; also 2015, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY 2014, 2013, 2011, 2009, 2007, 2005, 2003 Carnegie Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, PA 2016 Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC; also Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH 2007, 2005, 2004, 2002, 2000 Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH Early Work, Acme Fine Art, Boston Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX Recent Paintings, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WI Wolf Kahn: Solo Exhibition, Jackson Galerie de Bellefeuille, Dartmouth College Hood Museum, Hanover, NH El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX Montreal 2015 Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington, DC; also 2013, 2009, Fort Worth Art Center, Fort Worth, TX Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1994 Washington, DC 2010 Refractions of Light, Paintings and Pastels, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO 2009 Pastels, Spartanburg Art Museum, Spartanburg, SC Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA 2006 Color & Light, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Wolf Kahn's Barns, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI 2004 Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN 2001 Invited! Works on Paper, First Street Gallery, New York, NY Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC 1999 Southern Landscapes, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA 1997 Nevada Museum of Fine Art, Reno, NV Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX 1996-98 Boca Raton Museum, Boca Raton, FL (travelling exhibition) The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY 1994 The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA National Academy of Design Museum, New York, NY 1993 Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, FL National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990-91 Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, FL Washington, DC 1990 Nina Freudenheim, Buffalo, NY New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA 1989-92 Associated American Artists, New York, NY The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY 1987 Barbara Kornblatt Gallery, Washington, DC Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 1985 Meredith Long Gallery, Houston, TX; also 1971 Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA 1983 San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA 1982 Schenectady Museum, Schenectady, NY Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA 1981 The Arts Club of Chicago, IL State University of New York, Neuberger Museum of Art, 1979 Walker-Kornbluth Gallery, Fair Lawn, NJ Purchase, NY 1978 Fontana Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1975 Princeton Gallery of Fine Art, Princeton, NJ David Barnett Gallery, Milwaukee, WI AWARDS 1972 Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award, National Academy of Design 1966 Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award, Vermont Council on the 1965 Carlton Gallery, New York, NY Arts 1963 Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO 1966-67 Received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 1960 University of California, Berkeley, CA 1962 Received a Fulbright Scholarship to Italy 1953, 55 Hansa Gallery, New York, NY 40
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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com Š 2018 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š Wolf Kahn