Biography
Wolf
Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927. The son
of the conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra, he
was sent
to live with his grandmother in Frankfurt when he was three years
old. Kahn left Germany in 1939, as an eleven-year-old refugee
from Nazi Germany, to live in England. In 1940, Kahn joined
his father,
two brothers, and sister who had settled in the United States
and became a student at New York's High School of Music and
Art. After
serving in the Navy, he used the GI Bill to study with the well-known
teacher and abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann's
studio assistant. In 1950 he enrolled in the University of Chicago
from which he graduated in 1951 with a BA.
Having completed his baccalaureate degree in only one year, Kahn
was determined to become a professional artist. He and other former
Hofmann students established The Hansa, a cooperative gallery where
he had his first one man show. In 1956 he joined the Grace Borgenicht
Gallery where he exhibited regularly until 1995.
Mr. Kahn has received
a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship,
and an Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He is a member of the Nation Academy of Design, as well as the
American Academy of Arts and Letters and has recently completed
an appointment to the New York City Art Commission.
Traveling
extensively,
he has painted landscapes in such diverse locales as Maine,
Mexico, Italy, Greece, Kenya, New Mexico, Hawaii and Egypt. He
spends
his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, which
he and
his wife, the painter Emily Mason, have owned since 1968. They
have two daughters, Cecily and Melany. Cecily Kahn is a painter,
married to the painter David Kapp.
