'Soothe the Soul and Nurture the Imagination'

“Among the lessons we’ve learned during these past few difficult years of pandemic, climate crisis and political discord is that beauty and nature matter more than ever, and that if our homes are to be sanctuaries from an often harsh outside world, then we should fill them with objects and art that soothe the soul and nurture the imagination.” 

A friend who owns several paintings by Wolf Kahn (1927-2020) sent me an article (quoted above) in which the author, Anthony Barzilay Freund, describes the intensity of his reactions to Kahn’s work. I agree: his colors are ravishing. His landscapes and buildings glow. I’m untrained in the visual arts and can’t write or even think about them in a sophisticated fashion. Why the work of certain painters – Kahn, Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, Richard Diebenkorn, to cite only Americans – stirs so powerful an emotion remains a mystery.

 

An aesthetic capacity is almost universal among humans and yet for the last century or more we have valorized ugliness in all the arts. Consider the skylines of our cities, the music of Albert Ayler and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the proud incoherencies of the Language Poets. In his essay “Uses of Painting Today,” published in the Summer 1969 issue of Dedalus, Kahn writes:  

 

“Paintings, we are told, must communicate. But, then, every thing communicates depending on the willingness of people to look or listen. An artist really has no responsibility to try to communicate. If no audience is readily at hand, he is forced to wait till the receptors have become more sensitive and alert. This cannot happen overnight. Only the most conventional work speaks to all on first sight. An audience needs exposure, familiarity, a period of sympathetic watchfulness, before it becomes tuned to respond to any challenging art.”

 

Rather than embodying beauty, painting and the other arts today seem almost exclusively dedicated to communicating something – often the artist’s wish to offend and provoke, and certainly to relate a “message” and celebrate himself. Kahn’s paintings celebrate painting and, by implication, the world.