Wolf Kahn at Grace Borgenicht - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

above the years, Kahn's landscapes have routinely generated the question of whether he is an abstractionist or a realist. The novel abstract training is all there: Kahn studied with Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann in the 1940 on the other hand when he took up landscape a decade later, with renderings of compressed Italian olive groves and wide-open American spaces, he was as abundant championing a return to the little-mined quarry of American Impressionism as he was rigorously working without Hofmann's famed push-pull theories.

Kahn has continued to track his singular, synthetic approach. Today, when we are in the nearness of a small panoramic painting like A fresh Mexico Sunset the issue of abstraction versus realism becomes academic. At 66 Kahn has to the full mastered the agonies and the ecstasies of his hybrid mode of speech and stands virtually as a gymnasium of one.

going down of the sun is Kahn at a miniaturistic peak. Everything we've advance to expect from him and more are here: the gently blott painterly technique, thorough with deeply intime scumbling; the trademark, slightly neo-Fauve "hot" palette, giving rise to down-reaching chocolaty purple mountains at individual end of the spectrum and, at the other, a evening rendered in tender pink flame; and a heavens that is an exquisitely pale on the other hand somehow incandescent gray. This amalgamate of realism with abstraction is as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of the point of the painting as the view that is showed an achievement in romantic modernism reminiscent of Milton Avery's.

Like Avery, Kahn has not at any time been bashful about the notion of beauty. And beautiful is the alone accurate word for the large landscape called House Overlooking the Connecticut River. The river itself is a fluid, inauspicious mauve; its left-hand bank draw nears in darker purples, while the right-hand bank is all piquant goldens and greens, with a small r house - no more than a daub or sum of two units of paint - atop it.

There is, at times, the threat of romantic overload in these canvases, with their Bruckneresque gravity of view and dark poetic lyricism. While this quality does annoy more [i]or[/i] less viewers, it is essential to the artist's picturing forth of his vision, a distinctly German-American vision (the artist was born and wearied his first 13 years in Stuttgart) that call forths bitter-sweet melancholy even as it uplifts with its painterly purity and coloristic integrity.

All things considered, Kahn in his maturity stacks up as individual of our great painters in the modernist tradition. He is now busily outliving postmodernism, and single senses that his future work will smooth more handily override today's solipsistic conceptualism and sociopolitical tantrums.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group