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.”

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.

Another important element affecting both popularity and art world approval is subject matter. Kahn makes landscapes. As Susan Shatter, president of the National Academy of Design, which was founded in 1825 by landscape painters and where Kahn is a member, points out: “Landscape painting doesn’t interest critics; it’s too traditional. No one cares about real nature right now, so Kahn is coming from another world.” She adds that “photography has sucked up much of the landscape,” diverting the eye from painting.

Kahn has always been a colorist, employing a palette for his depictions of mountains, rocks, rivers, oceans, fields and the buildings associated with them—especially barns—that is so ravishing that nature at its gaudy best pales beside its hues. His style is impressionistic, and the resulting paintings are luminous, vividly bright and yet entirely serene, even dreamlike.

A defining fact of Kahn’s career, and of the careers of other artists at his level, is that our culture has made a commitment to the edgy and the iconoclastic at the expense of the beautiful. Beautiful has become equated with trivial.

The volume of an artist’s output also helps determine his reputation. Kahn is prolific, producing new works regularly, season after season. “Bonnard’s dealer told him he painted too much,” Kahn says. “I paint too much.” He laughs. “My productivity has been increased by success. When you have the wind in your sails, you forge ahead faster. I don’t golf, play ball, watch television or use computers, so I paint.” On one hand, this may discourage people from competing too urgently to buy a work, because others will soon be available. On the other hand, it’s a boon to collectors to find a good supply always available.

Critical approbation, too, can affect how fervently the market embraces an artist. Does Kahn just lack a forceful champion—a present-day Clement Greenberg—to catapult him into a new league? Margaret Kaplan, editor at large at Harry N. Abrams, Kahn’s publisher, says that although “it used to happen that a critic could turn an artist’s career around,” this doesn’t occur nowadays, either because the art world has become so large that critics’ voices are lost or because they choose to stay out of the fray.

Doyle’s Porcher, however, believes that having an advocate helps. Avery, for example, started selling well only about 10 years ago, a turnaround Porcher attributes partly to the tenacity of Sally Avery, who worked tirelessly for her husband’s career. A measure of Avery’s success: One of his oils, The Reader and the Listener, 1945, sold for $2.5 million at Sotheby’s on November 28, 2007.

Kahn has little patience with handicapping the auction market, especially Avery’s. “He was very quiet and laconic,”Kahn says. “He painted a painting in the morning and another in the afternoon. He didn’t agonize. He figured some would turn out good, some wouldn’t. The public would decide.”

Artists’ careers can be rejuvenated when their works are shown in a new context. “Bob Rosenblum did the Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim [2001–2] and caused a big controversy,” Kaplan says. “Paul Gottlieb [then of Abrams] talked Carter Brown at the National Gallery into doing the Andrew Wyeth ‘Helga’ show, which was heavily criticized.” The exhibition toured from 1987 to ’89, and the Abrams book sold more than 500,000 copies. In both cases, attention was paid, bringing the artists back into the limelight. Wyeth hit a high of $10.3 million at Christie’s in 2007 for Ericksons, 1953, and has exceeded $1 million seven times since 2000, while Rockwell made an artist’s record of $15.4 million for Breaking Home Ties, 1953, at Sotheby’s in 2006.

Instead of critics, curators and spouses, the star makers in the 21st century are more likely to be publicists coupled with aggressive gallery owners who represent artists with sensational presentations. Jeff Koons’s flowering puppies or Damien Hirst’s sushied sharks and diamond-studded skulls catch the public’s imagination quicker than a quiet if masterly painter.

Kahn graciously acknowledges the masterly part, but he also calls himself an avant-garde painter. “What we admire today is energy and clarity and simplicity, and I’m hoping that’s what my art is about,” he says. “People are realizing what an original Avery was, and one day maybe they will realize that about me.”

"Portrait of the Artist's Market" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.