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Details
Signed ‘W Kahn’ (lower right); titled, dated and numbered ‘#21A. 1994 Lilac Haze’ on the stretcher bar; dated and numbered ‘#1994 / 21A’ on the reverse of the canvas.
Sizes:
Artwork: 56 × 74.5 cm | 22 × 29.3 in
A wall of tall, thin trunks rises out of a band of bright green meadow and dissolves into a lilac haze; at the top the crowns break into soft patches of yellow, lime and mint against a pale pink sky. The trunks are drawn in quick strokes of white, rose and blue over the violet ground, and across the foot of the canvas a strip of the same lilac lies in the green like the reflection of the wood in standing water. Nothing is outlined: the trees exist as vertical rhythm and the light as colour.
This is Wolf Kahn at the height of his mature manner. A pupil and studio assistant of Hans Hofmann in New York in the late 1940s, Kahn (1927–2020) spent the rest of his life painting the woods, barns and meadows around his farm in southern Vermont in colours no landscape painter had dared before him, keeping the motif while handling the canvas as a colour-field painter would. Stands of trees seen through atmosphere, here in violet, elsewhere in orange or magenta, were his favourite subject of the 1990s. The painting carries on the stretcher and the reverse the inventory number Kahn gave each of his canvases, year and sequence, as ‘#21A. 1994’.
Provenance
Private Collection, New York.
Acquired from the above in the 2000s; thence by descent.
Condition Report
Oil on canvas, unlined, on the artist’s stretcher with a central vertical bar. The paint layer is stable; minor rubbing to the pale band along the upper edge, a little fine craquelure in the impasto of the lower right corner around the signature, and light surface dirt. The unpainted tacking margins are frayed, as is usual with the artist’s canvases; unframed. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
Shipping
Packed as size M (up to 80 × 60 cm) · 74.5 × 56 cm
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- Made-to-measure wooden crate (works over 20,000 €)
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We coordinate packing and shipping on your behalf, with insurance available if you’d like it — or you’re welcome to arrange your own. Please see our Shipping Information page for full details before completing your purchase.
Authenticity & Buyer Information
This lot is catalogued under the artist’s name without qualification. Provenance, dating and condition are described to the best of our knowledge; the sale is governed by our Conditions of Sale.
Buyers should review the catalogue carefully and raise any questions before bidding; additional information is not ordinarily provided after the auction.
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Market context
Oils on canvas by Wolf Kahn of this size have sold at Christie's and Bonhams since 2022 for about 44,000 to 51,000 USD including premium, each against an estimate of 20,000–35,000 USD; the Kahn canvas we offered ourselves in March 2026 made 30,000 € hammer.
| Date | Sale | Work | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 April 2026 | Christie's | Row of Black Trees, 2007, oil on canvas, 61 x 71.1 cm | 50,800 USD with premium (estimate 20,000–30,000) |
| 16 April 2026 | Christie's | Bluebonnets + Mesquite, 1985, oil on canvas, 55.9 x 86.4 cm | 44,450 USD with premium (estimate 20,000–30,000) |
| 24 August 2022 | Bonhams, New York | Summer Trees Against a Deep Blue Sky, 1994, oil on canvas, 56.2 x 92.1 cm | 50,775 USD with premium (estimate 25,000–35,000) |
| 21 March 2026 | Aurora & Athena, Barcelona | Orange Forest, oil on canvas, 59.5 x 89 cm | 30,000 EUR hammer, 38,400 EUR with premium (estimate 20,000–30,000) |
Prices as published by the selling houses, including their buyer’s premium, in the currency of the sale. Estimate for this lot: €20,000–30,000.
What it costs
Bidding on this site, the buyer’s premium is 25%, Spanish IVA included. There is no VAT on the hammer price and no card fee.
| Starting price | Low estimate | High estimate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hammer price | €10,000 | €20,000 | €30,000 |
| Buyer’s premium 25% (IVA included) | €2,500 | €5,000 | €7,500 |
| Total on auroraathena.com | €12,500 | €25,000 | €37,500 |
| Total through a bidding platform (30%) | €13,000 | €26,000 | €39,000 |
Through LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, Drouot or Bidspirit the premium is 30%: the same hammer of €30,000 costs €39,000 there against €37,500 here. Shipping and insurance are quoted separately; the estimator below gives the figure for your country. Buyers outside the EU pay no Spanish tax on the lot; the destination’s import rules apply (United States: original paintings and drawings enter duty-free; United Kingdom: 5% import VAT on art). Card payments are accepted up to €10,000; larger amounts by bank transfer.
Questions about this lot
How does the estimate compare with the artist’s recent auction results?
Oils on canvas by Wolf Kahn of this size have sold at Christie's and Bonhams since 2022 for about 44,000 to 51,000 USD including premium, each against an estimate of 20,000–35,000 USD; the Kahn canvas we offered ourselves in March 2026 made 30,000 € hammer.
The results we compared are listed under “Market context” on this page, each with its source, so you can check them.
What will this lot cost in total?
Bidding on this site, the buyer’s premium is 25%, Spanish IVA included, and there is no VAT on the hammer price and no card fee: at the starting price of €10,000 the total is €12,500; at the low estimate of €20,000 the total is €25,000; at the high estimate of €30,000 the total is €37,500.
Through LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, Drouot or Bidspirit the premium is 30%, so the same hammer of €30,000 costs €39,000 there. Shipping and insurance are quoted separately; the estimator on this page gives the figure for your country. Buyers outside the EU pay no Spanish tax on the lot; the destination’s import rules apply (United States: original paintings and drawings enter duty-free; United Kingdom: 5% import VAT on art). Card payments are accepted up to €10,000; larger amounts by bank transfer.
How is this lot catalogued?
Under the artist’s name without qualification. Provenance, dating, condition and value are described to the best of our knowledge; the sale is governed by the Conditions of Sale.
Can I see the condition report, more photographs or the work itself?
A condition report with ultraviolet photographs is prepared on request, normally within two working days; the condition summary on this page is examined in-house and is not a conservator’s report. Further photographs of any detail, the reverse or the frame are sent on request. The work can be examined in our Barcelona showroom by appointment before the sale, and you are welcome to send your own conservator or specialist.
How does bidding work, and can a maximum bid make me overpay?
You can leave a maximum bid before the sale (the sale is on Saturday, November 28th - 17:00 (CET)) or bid live in our online room. A maximum bid is executed by the auctioneer only as much as is needed to stay ahead of other bidders, in the sale’s increments, never above your maximum.
Where a reserve exists it never exceeds the low estimate; a lot without a reserve sells to the highest bid at or above the starting price of €10,000.
Is there a limit on how much I can bid?
Every account is approved for bidding as soon as the e-mail address is confirmed, with a limit of €5,000 per bid until the identity is verified. The limit applies everywhere: in the live room, on the lot page and to maximum bids. To bid without a limit, verify your identity in your account on this site: it takes about three minutes on a phone, is done once, and the limit is lifted automatically as soon as the check is complete. Please do it at least an hour before the sale.
Wolf Kahn
Wolf Kahn was born Hans Wolfgang Kahn in Stuttgart in 1927, the son of a conductor and composer who lost his post with the Stuttgart Philharmonic in 1933 and emigrated to America. The boy stayed with his grandmother in Frankfurt, was sent to England in 1939 and joined his family in New York in 1940. After a year in the US Navy he studied at the Hans Hofmann School on the GI Bill and by the summer of 1947 was Hofmann’s studio assistant in Provincetown; he then took a bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago. He showed with the Hansa Gallery cooperative in downtown New York from 1952 and had his first solo exhibition there in 1953. In 1957 he married the painter Emily Mason, his companion in life and work for more than sixty years.
From the late 1950s Kahn turned from pure abstraction to the landscape without giving up what he had learned from Hofmann and the Abstract Expressionists. A Fulbright year in Italy in 1962 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 were followed in 1968 by the purchase of a farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont, whose woods, barns, meadows and ponds became his subject for the next half century.
His mature oils and pastels keep the motif, a stand of trees, the side of a barn, a line of hills, but treat it as a field of colour, in violets, oranges, magentas and acid greens that describe light and mood rather than local colour. He received the Award in Art of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979, was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1980 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1984, and received the State Department’s International Medal of Art in 2017.
Kahn died in March 2020, aged 92. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many other American collections; the Wolf Kahn Foundation is preparing the catalogue raisonné of his work.
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