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Banner file photo
The premier American landscape painter Wolf Kahn in his studio.
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Banner file photo
“On the Deck (Provincetown), Summer” is a 1956 oil on canvas that was on display in Provincetown about 50 years ago. That show was mostly made up of works inspired by Kahn’s future wife, Emily Mason. |
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Wolf Kahn show opens Friday
By Ann Wood
Banner Staff
Wolf Kahn, one of the most respected living landscape painters in America today, spent some of his most formative years as an artist in Provincetown. Yet the works he created here in the 1940s and ’50s have never been shown together — until now.
“I’m sort of excited to see it myself,” he says by phone from his New York home. “To see it in a body is kind of fun. It’s like revisiting one’s history.”
The exhibition, entitled “Wolf Kahn in Provincetown,” is now showing at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St., Provincetown. A reception will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at the museum — but don’t expect to see Kahn there. He says he’ll come during the course of the show to give a lecture instead.
“I have a lot to say. I don’t know what I’m even going to talk about,” Kahn says. “I think it’s good, in general, not to be too prepared and not to have agendas and just to allow things to happen, because if you have a lively mind, you’re going to allow things to happen anytime.”
Since his days in Provincetown, Kahn has become known as the premier American landscape painter. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His works are held in the permanent collections of major museums, including the National Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.
Widely known for his pastels and oil paintings, he doesn’t choose to use one over the other for any particular reason.
“I’m not interested in product, you know, I’m not interested in one medium,” he says, adding that he’s simply interested in staying fresh. “I think that’s an artist’s job, to keep his eye clear and to keep his mind clear and not be too goal-oriented.”
In 1947, Kahn came to Provincetown to study with Hans Hofmann.
Due to his German background, he became Hofmann’s translator and apprentice. He was the one student who understood what the German-born artist was saying.
“I understood it all too well. I’m still under the sway of it,” Kahn says of Hofmann’s teachings. “I’ve met some great men in my life and he was one of them.”
Beyond Hofmann and even the landscape and seascape of the Outer Cape, Provincetown was inspirational in Kahn’s life in another way. He followed his future wife, the painter Emily Mason, to town in 1956.
“I’m a city person. I came back to Provincetown in the mid-’50s in order to court my wife. I was actually living with her before we were married and then she went off to Italy as a Fulbright scholar,” he says. “I chased after her. I didn’t want those Venetians to go after her.”
“I was very happy with her. I’ve [been] really happy with her for 49 years,” he says, adding that they have two daughters, one of whom is a painter and the other a filmmaker. “We found out we were really compatible in Provincetown. We used to go out at low tide and go clamming. [We’re] tight as ticks. I’ve led a very charmed life. Well, I mean, ever since I left Germany. Early it was very tough.”
While he’s captured those Provincetown days on canvas, he has no desire to organize those paintings for a show this time around.
“Let them play,” Kahn says. “I think exhibitions are the curators’ work, and painting the individual pictures is what my work is. I don’t like to have too much input into that much stuff. I’m very pleased other people are willing to spend time on my affairs.”
awood@provincetownbanner.com
For the entire text of this article see this week’s Banner.
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In the Arts
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May 18th, 2006