Portrait of the Artist's Market

Photo by Jelle Wagener

At 80, Wolf Kahn looks back fondly on a life in art. “I’ve made a living as an artist since I was 25,” he says. “I have never done anything careerist in my life.”

Photo by Jelle Wagener

Kahn’s studio is filled with his painted canvases, a testament to his productivity.

Milton Avery Andrew Wyeth Joan Mitchell Alex Katz Susan Rothenberg Wayne Thiebaud Richard Diebenkorn Helen Frankenthaler

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Kahn’s two-part show of recent work, “Sizing Up,” has just opened at his West 57th Street gallery, Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art. Most pieces were sold before being hung. The 15 large paintings range in price from $75,000 to $125,000; the 21 smaller pastels, from $7,500 to $20,000. (Some of Kahn’s biggest markets are outside of New York. Jerald Melberg Gallery of Charlotte, North Carolina; Stremmel Gallery of Reno, Nevada; and Addison/Ripley Fine Art of Washington, D.C., all do particularly big business.)

“I was very pleased with the show—so pleased that after the opening, I went into a plunge and felt terrible for about a week,” Kahn says, now sitting in his neat, spare studio. “But I kept working and painted my way out of it.”

The reviews in Art in America, the New Criterion and the New York Sun ranged from favorable to glowing. The New York Times, in contrast, was silent. It hasn’t covered a one-man Kahn show in its art section since 1985. Yet it was Vivien Raynor, writing in the Times about a group show in 1996, who came up with the perfect phrase for  Kahn’s landscapes: “chromatic arias.”

Without a doubt, Kahn has made a brilliant career. He sells well (his prices increase about 10 percent every year), is represented in the collections of major museums and had a well-respected Manhattan dealer, Grace Borgenicht, for 41 years, until the gallery closed, in 1996. He helped found a cooperative gallery, the Hansa, which operated from 1952 to ’59. He has taught and lectured widely, supports a foundation and has written three books. He is, moreover, sociable and charming.

But something is missing. Although a significant figure, Kahn is not in the pantheon of American master painters of the past 50 years—Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, Rothko, Kelly—whose works sell for tens of millions of dollars. One critic calls Kahn a “minor master, or even a major minor master,” putting him in the lower half of a long list of color-field, landscape and figurative painters that includes Jennifer Bartlett, Philip Pearlstein, Susan Rothenberg, Alex Katz, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Joan Mitchell and Kahn’s sometime painting companion Milton Avery.

Kahn’s auction prices reflect his standing in this group. His best price at auction was for Declivity, 1968, a large blue and white oil of a sharply inclined hill, which fetched $53,775 at Christie’s New York on March 4, 2003, exceeding its high estimate by more than $20,000. (That was a good day for Kahn at Christie’s; two other oils of his brought an additional $51,385.) His high at Sotheby’s New York, achieved this past October, was $40,000, for a 1973 oil, The White Roof (Emily’s Studio).

The principal auction venues for Kahn’s pictures are the smaller houses—Bonhams & Butterfields, Swann Auction Galleries and Doyle New York—and assorted exurban establishments. Although Doyle sells big-name painters, it is an ideal place for the mid-range artist. “Our minimum is $1,000,” says Harold Porcher, the house’s director of modern and contemporary art. “So we can take on whole collections rather than cherry-pick them.”

Porcher says that most of the Kahns he sells are from estates and are therefore early works. This is a good sign, in his view, because it means that the people who buy the artist’s pictures are not looking to trade up; they really like what they have. Kahn’s top price at Doyle came in 2007: $20,000 for the 1983 painting A Park on a River.

“Kahn has tremendous staying power,” Porcher continues. “He is not an evolving artist who has ‘periods,’ but his work has sophistication. It provides a taste of modernism without being threatening.”