Wolf_Kahn_2009

Interview with the Artist Art turns out to be self expression in spite of one’s best intention.

—WK

Jill Newhouse : Can you tell us something about the role of drawing in your work in the 1950 s? Wolf Kahn : Wherever I travelled, I took a sketchbook and pen and ink; later I worked with conte crayon and pencil but in the early works, it was mostly pen. Whatever inter ested me, I drew. Starting in high school, I did caricatures and portraits of friends. I also went every weekend to the Central Park Zoo. I had a real addiction to drawing there. JN : What artists and what drawings were you looking at or studying in the 1950 s? WK : I looked at Rembrandt, Claude and Corot. Corot’s work is wonderfully ambiguous and leaves a lot to the imagination, which I like. Later I looked a great deal at Morandi and Bonnard. I was also a friend of deKooning and I think his work influenced me; I adapted what I learned from him to the landscape. JN : When you studied with Hofmann, did you ever draw abstractly, or were all your drawings representational? WK : Even when making non-descriptive moves, I was, and am, a representational painter. André Gide said “art is a collaboration between the artist and God and the less work the artist does, the better.” JN : Do you think of your drawings differently from your paintings and pastels? Did they develop in a parallel fashion, or independently? WK : I do not make a distinction between drawing and painting in that way. I never gave any thought to trying to relate the different facets of my work. I was not interested in forging a style; I was just doing my work.