American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Collection of Charles and Virginia Bowden

Note

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, ultimately immigrating to New Jersey amid the tumult of World War II. Settling with his family in New York in 1943, Kahn studied at the prestigious High School of Music and Art and, subsequently, the New School, but withdrew in order to serve as an apprentice to fellow German-American painter, Hans Hofmann, whose own work was integral to the rise of Abstract Expressionism. In the decades that followed, Kahn exhibited extensively, while developing a signature, if idiosyncratic, approach to form and color. Decamping for Vermont in 1968, Kahn found inspiration in the state’s rural environs. In a 1983 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune—the same year he executed the present work, Barn in Early Spring—Kahn praised “…the light, [the] shifting horizons [and] the variety and gentleness” of the bucolic scenes he encountered there.

Since his earliest foray into the subject in 1966, barns would emerge as a powerful and persistent theme throughout Kahn’s nearly 70-year career. From his hillside studio in Vermont, across New England, or points farther afield, they were an invitation to explore the juxtaposition of architecture and environment. Commingling an intuitive grasp of color, light, and atmosphere with the formal restraint of mid-century Color Field painting, Kahn’s virtuosity is on full display in Barn in Early Spring. Measured brushwork, a preference for reduction over literal description, and expressive hues—here, a palette of luminous cantaloupe—mark the very best of Kahn’s compositions. The barn, picturesque in its modesty, occupies the majority of the paintings 36 x 52 inches.

Belying its impressive scale, however, is a quiet grandeur; simplicity—of form and composition—and a sensitivity to place reign supreme. For Kahn, “…the simpler the issue, the better…it [was] never the barn by itself that [engaged him], but the way it grows out of the land, the way the sky and trees surround it, and how the horizon is interrupted by the barn’s silhouette.” A natural and built environment in perfect harmony, as in the present painting, informed the artist’s career-long celebration of unpeopled landscapes. Boasting calculated brushwork, striking color, and architecture that’s of the landscape, not merely on it, works like Barn in Early Spring deliver strength and delicacy in equal measure.