Wolfgang Kahn was born in Stuttgart (where his father was conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic) in 1927. He and his brother fled Germany two weeks before World War II broke out, eventually settling on New York’s Upper West Side with the rest of their family members, who had made the crossing at different times. At 19, Kahn entered the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and became Hofmann’s studio assistant, a role cited in even his shortest biography. He had previously studied with Stuart Davis, but it was Hofmann, a charismatic teacher who emphasized working from nature and chromatic tension and movement, who started Kahn on the road to becoming the painter he is today. “I still consider myself a faithful Hofmann student,” Kahn says. Eventually he married a painter, Emily Mason, the daughter of the painter Alice Trumbell Mason, and had two daughters.

Among Kahn’s friends at Hofmann’s school were Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher and Allan Kaprow. Soon he added other  New Yorkers, including Fairfield Porter, the de Koonings, Thiebaud, Diebenkorn, Avery, and critic Meyer Schapiro. In short order, he knew everyone in the art world, and everyone knew him. Over time he received honors as various as a Guggenheim Fellowship and an appointment, in 1993, as vice president for art at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Many of those early friends and other contemporaries sell for much more than Kahn does in galleries and in the secondary market, but if this bothers him, he blithely sweeps the irritation aside. “I’ve made a living as an artist since I was 25,” he says. “I have never done anything careerist in my life. Mostly people like my work and have come to me. I’ve worked with children, done posters, books and promotions. After all, if you depend on selling exclusively to millionaires, you have a very small public.”

Kahn, Freilicher, Neil Welliver, Porter, Will Barnet and Alfred Leslie are among a group of artists who have devoted followings—some collectors buy a Kahn at nearly every show, and Bill Clinton bought three for his and Hillary’s 30th anniversary—but who haven’t attained household-name fame. All are admired by other artists, even those of a younger generation.

One Kahn fan is the painter Jacob Collins, 43, who works in the Barbizon/Hudson River School style and who, like Kahn, is a traditionalist whose work critics are apt to overlook. (None of Collins’s pieces have been put up at auction, but he is doing well in the primary market, having sold out 23 shows and received $100,000 for a commissioned family portrait through his gallery, Hirschl & Adler, in New York.) As a child, Collins met the older artist when both their families summered on Martha’s Vineyard. “Kahn is my role model of a successful painter,” Collins says. “Although he is a modernist, he makes paintings with a 19th-century flavor—they have very structured draftsmanship, even when they are loose or airy. Not a lot of other artists provide that link.”  

The story of who is great, who is good and who has been unjustly overlooked or forgotten never ends; the final chapter has yet to be written. But at a given moment in a particular place, judgments are made, and laurels are awarded or withheld according to a complicated skein of factors.

A major contributor to market success is the “breakthrough” moment, the perfect merging of an artist with the Zeitgeist. The most obvious example of this is Jackson Pollock, who with his drip paintings in the 1940s, changed forever the way we look at art. This has not been Kahn’s destiny.

“Wolf has always been parallel rather than central to dominant trends at every moment,” says Barbara Haskell, a curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “His work isn’t radical, the way Avery’s was in his day, and as a result is under the radar for a lot of people.” Haskell points out that acclaim and market success don’t always arrive in a timely fashion, citing Albert Pinkham Ryder and Marsden Hartley as examples of painters who were underappreciated, and undervalued, in their day.