Wolf Kahn at Beadleston - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In this "Overview"--and in his 70th year--Wolf Kahn again prov himself an artist who unabashedly courts the beautiful. Here individual could imagine appreciative viewers saying of Kahn's super-size, high-color, high-density paintings, "This is the way landscape should look" individual could equally imagine others saying, "Landscape doesn't, and shouldn't, gaze like this--not since American Impressionism a hundred ago."

The exhibition wasn't, however, a genuine overview. Throwing in a 1954 self-portrait and a two of canvases from the `70 hardly distinguishable from those of the mid-'90s that made up the majority of the display does not even a mini-retrospective make. Still, it was an of the first grade chance for receptive viewers to triumph in the sere-yet-gorgeous landscapes of of recent origin England and other American environs that Kahn is known for. single of the ways he arrives at his supercharged views is to paint nature at most remote moments. As After Twilight Fadeth in the West (1997) is a waterscape at sunsetting the brilliant natural effects resolving themselves, with heavy elan, into a thick diagonal of verdant (!) clouds; a broad stripe of fading, scarlet-spotted orange sunlight; a lengthy linear brown-black jetty; bluer-than-blue waters; and another diagonal of chunky verdant at canvas bottom.

Despite his romantic naturalism, Kahn touches all new stylistic bases through his shameless abstracting. In Around the Corner upon the River (1996), what might be a cyclopean close-up of a storm above water (sky and waters are for the greatest part matte gray) is skillfully transformed into a Whistlerian nocturne built from generalized areas of color--big, vaguely geometric shapes whose likeness to nature, if any, have the appearances coincidental.

Kahn's course is to sustain the conceptual duality of abstraction v representation. When the sum of two units act in concert, as in of great depth Blue Ridge (1997), with its transcendently physical thicket of bare branches in lyrical brown and magical purple Kahn is nearly without compeer among contemporary landscapists. When they do not quite balance--as in the nearly 6-by-7-foot region Road--the results can look like an overexpos photographic negative.

This exhibition boasted enough paintings that capitalized upon the Kahnian formal-figurative split to make it a standout of the season. Looking Down upon the Ocean, quadripartite in color and composition, is a pictorial transposition of the crazed formalism of nature itself. In this present to view the more Kahn struggled to equal nature upon his own painterly terms, the closer he got to the heart of the matter.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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