Throughout his illustrious seven-decade career, Wolf Kahn remained committed to imparting a compelling sensation of light and vibrancy of color into his body of work. In the late 1940s, the German-born artist trained under leading post-war painter, Hans Hofmann, which formed the basis for his artistic education. “He claimed for his ideas a kind of universality which I found congenial to my own need for absolutes,” Kahn recalled of the relationship with Hofmann (Justin Spring, Wolf Kahn, New York, 2011, p. 18). Despite his close involvement with the Abstract Expressionist master, Kahn’s early academic influences transcended art historical movements. From Van Gogh to Soutine and Braque – the latter whom he called “the first artist I felt I understood completely,” Kahn sought inspiration from his predecessors, while simultaneously drawing upon his immediate surroundings and natural environment first and foremost (ibid, p. 18).

Although many of Kahn’s early works are monochromatic and reductionary in terms of both color and form, he quickly developed a propensity for the bright colors which now characterize his oeuvre. Upon purchasing a farm in Vermont in 1968, Kahn utilized the adjacent barn as his studio and settled into the routine of illustrating the natural world around him. Wooded New England scenes and sun-drenched landscapes documenting the nearby Connecticut River soon became the hallmark subjects of Kahn’s career.

Vertical is dominated by richly-applied pink hues and celebrates the artist’s lifelong devotion to tree-lined landscapes. In the present work, Kahn creates a rhythmic quality through his repetition of the slender tree motif. To offset the strong verticality of the composition – for which the painting is named – the artist employs horizontally-arranged brushstrokes which appear to quiver as they meet the viewer’s eye. Just as the forest subject is a recurring theme for Kahn, so is the vibrant pink palette. His fascination with the color pink dates as far back as the 1980s. “I was in a pink phase,” Kahn recalls of the late eighties, even traveling to Washington, D.C. to see the widely celebrated cherry blossom season. “I thought nothing could be pinker than cherry blossoms – but it turned out they were mostly just white” (Kahn, "Wolf Kahn's America: An Artist's Travels," p. 9). From hot bands of magenta to softer rose-colored hues, the color pink pervades many of Kahn’s most successful paintings, including the present example. A review of Kahn’s work in The New York t.mes s from 1972 perfectly describes the artist’s relationship with color: “these are not colors that sunlight finds in nature; they are colors that an aroused sensibility finds, with joy, in the act of painting” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Wolf Kahn,” The New York t.mes s, 19 November 1972).

Although his application of color is bright and striking, the calming presence of Kahn’s landscapes is central to their appeal. His paintings reflect a warmth and familiarity that stems from the artist’s decision to return to familiar places; however, his approach to painting was never overly orchestrated. “I don’t go to places to see anything pre-selected. I like to be taken by surprise,” Kahn insists (Kahn, "Wolf Kahn's America: An Artist's Travels," p. 88). His mature works of the early 2000s are a continuation of the themes that Kahn had explored for decades, executed on increasingly enlarged canvases. Dated 2007, Vertical showcases the culmination of Kahn’s artistic maturity in regard to his approach to color, compositional harmony, and his relationship with nature. As curator Karen Wilkin put it, “his large canvases of the 2000s explored a shifting territory located somewhere between the familiar and the imagined, between the specific and the dreamlike, even between the scrupulously observed and the abstract” (Karen Wilkin, "Late Work," in Wolf Kahn, p. 162).

With its bands of color and textured painterly approach, Vertical highlights the influence that Abstract Expressionism and color field painting had on Kahn's oeuvre, yet simultaneously celebrates the originality of his process and his daring use of vibrant colors.