Holocaust Memorial Lecture: Growing Up Privileged, and Jewish, in Nazi Germany

KEENE, NH 9/14/06 - The Cohen Center is proud to host American painter Wolf Kahn as its ninth annual Holocaust Memorial Lecturer on Monday, September 18, at 7:30 p.m. in the Mabel Brown Room of the Student Center.

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, the son of musician and Stuttgart Symphony Orchestra conductor Emil Kahn. He was sent to Frankfurt at age three to live with his grandmother; his mother died in a sanatorium two years later. Wolf Kahn fled Nazi Germany in 1939 - soon after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 - to live as a refugee in England.

In 1940 Kahn joined his father, two brothers, and a sister in New York City. He became a student at New York’s High School of Music and Art.

After serving in the U.S. Navy, Kahn used the G.I. Bill to study with the well-known teacher and abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. He later joined other former Hofmann students to form The Hansa, a cooperative gallery. Kahn’s highly regarded landscapes are characterized as “pure constructions of color and light,” evoking “a world of timeless beauty.”

For more information, contact the Cohen Center for Holocaust Studies at 603-358-2490.