Wolf Kahn Monoprint

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, Wolf Kahn fled Nazi Germany to Britain through the Kindertransport in the late 1930s. He eventually settled in the United States, where he completed high school and enrolled in the Navy. Following his service, he studied with the legendary teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, eventually becoming his studio assistant.

In 1950, Kahn enrolled at the University of Chicago and completed his bachelor of arts degree within one year. He had his first solo exhibition at Hansa Gallery in New York City in 1953 and went on to be represented by Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995.

Kahn was the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Medal of Arts from the State Department. He married the artist Emily Mason in 1957. Their marriage lasted sixty-two years until Emily’s death in December 2019, just a few months before Kahn's passing. The pair lived and worked between New York City and W. Brattleboro, Vermont.

Kahn’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums throughout North America. His work is held in important museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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(Biography provided by Miles McEnery Gallery)

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

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