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Artistic tenure
After 55 years as a Stanford art professor, Matt Kahn holds a retrospective exhibit of textured, glowing paintings

by Sue Dremann

With the first glimpse of "Landmark," a viewer sees a flat painting composed of diagonal lines forming a mesh. It's a meditation on the interaction between fog and the steel of the Golden Gate Bridge.

But the longer one looks at Matt Kahn's paintings, the more suffused with color they become. On a second pass, the viewer can now see that the "Landmark" gray-and-white canvas ripples with the subtle pink and orange colors of sunset.

That's true of all of Kahn's works now being shown at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery on the university campus. Tour the exhibit once, then round it a second time, and the subjects of his object-paintings emit colored light. Warriors, animals, water, air, mist and fire seem to glow with the energy of their souls.

Kahn's three-dimensional, shaped canvases most often take on the forms of subjects from nature -- butterflies emerging from cocoons, tribal animal masks -- and such human experiences as childhood, war, and the worship of icons and totems.

There are quite a few canvases from which to choose. Kahn's retrospective exhibition, which runs through Feb. 6, covers his 55 years as an art professor at Stanford.

Kahn has reached inside the canvas to explore the inner life of each of his subjects. The edges of painted surfaces are angled: the canvas is pulled to form pockets, then colored in such a way that each emanates its own inner light.

"Canyonlands" (1986), for example, celebrates the earliest dawning light at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, where the top surface of the earth remained shrouded in darkness, but all of the sand-colored canyons in the distance shone with brilliant light.

Kahn constructed a canvas with ridges and grooves, then painted the canvas surface black. Its grooves are painted a golden sand color, which creates a glow as it reflects light back onto the top surfaces of the painting. But if one makes the rounds of the show and returns to the painting, the sandy grooves dance with subtle, mirage-like colors.

The exhibition covers works spanning Kahn's career - including examples of his earliest work in 1947 while a student at the Cranbrook Art Academy in Michigan - and several examples of three-dimensional objects he designed while living and working in Cambodia in the late 1950s.

But mostly, the exhibition draws from major areas of interest that have inspired his work, grouped throughout the gallery under headings such as "Warriors," "Childhood," "Ambience," "Music" and "Artifacts."

Presiding over the entrance of the exhibition is a work combining nearly all of these elements: "Myth" (2003), a large, bird-like form with an open beak. A collector of tribal art, Kahn has been deeply influenced by masks from the Mayan and Kwakiutl (Native North Americans living in British Columbia) cultures.

"I couldn't afford a big Kwakiutl piece, so dammit, I'm going to make my own," he said during a recent tour of the exhibit. Inside the form's gaping mouth is the face of a man/creature. Using a silvery color referring back to his earlier warrior works, this semblance of armor is a kind of protective mask, he said. "Sometimes we put on a mask to hide ourselves or to reveal another self."

Now 77, Kahn has taught everything from painting to sculpture at Stanford, but his major mark as a mentor has been in design. He has been a major influence on such notables as Mark Fuller, designer of the Bellagio's fountains in Las Vegas; David Kelley, founder and CEO of the IDEO design firm in Palo Alto; and celebrated fiber artist Jean Ray Laury.

"Matt Kahn was one of the great influences in my life. He was an incredibly inspiring teacher: encouraging, demanding, insightful and fun," said Laury, whose own retrospective exhibition is now at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. "I learned more about quilting from him than I ever learned from anyone else, though I'm sure he never held a needle in his life."

Kelley thinks of Kahn every day while working on design projects and asks himself, "What would Matt do?"

Kelley added: "He taught me how to look at other people's work and develop a language: How does this fit? What's its intention? In most of my prior career, people would just say 'I like it.'"

In the current exhibit, Kahn the painter merges with Kahn the designer in the shaped canvas "Chrysalis" (1990). From the half-moon of a cocoon, an orange butterfly emerges. Its pointed wings, still wet and unopened, stab across the backdrop of the gallery wall like large bars of colored, multi-hued light. Colors subdued by the moistness of the new wings anticipate the glorious spectacle about to unfold.

Throughout the piece, Kahn's sensibilities as a designer show in its three-dimensional form, detail and object-like quality.

A more luminous sense of color, both beautiful and foreboding, emanates from the ethereal lime green "Preying Mantis Praying," (2002). It's Kahn's response to religious extremism, a pun on Osama bin Laden and those who use faith as justification for their atrocities, he said.

Iconic and statuesque, the mantis presides over a group of works categorized as "Warriors." The series of flat works reflect Kahn's preoccupation with militant patriotism. Works such as "Stop," (1969), an anti-Vietnam war poster, reflect the dire psychology of the warrior psyche. A human skull wears a helmet of spikes and stars. "It's just as relevant now," Kahn reflected, with a hint of sadness.

That the "Warrior" images appear in black and white, compared to the later colored works of the last decade, seems no accident. The earlier works speak of acts of naked aggression, but "Preying Mantis Praying" and "Liberty," with its Statue of Liberty crown reduced to stabbing spikes jutting from the wall, seem to speak of a more insidious form of violence -- one cloaked by colorful ideals and ideologies.

The exhibition offers a good opportunity to understand the transformation of style in the artist's work. Kahn doesn't have distinct periods, as most historians perceive many artists do -- think Picasso's famed "Blue Period." Instead, over the years, Kahn returns to explore new facets of his subject matter as part of his personal growth.

Early works such as "The Winged Cat" (1955) are pure fantasy, but indicate the first inklings of his later characteristic use of diagonal lines. And the two-dimensional "Stardust" (1961) reflects the energy of the cosmos through bursts of light between the spaces of a sunflower's leaves. It is perhaps in line with his later preoccupations with light and life force in his three-dimensional paintings.

Kahn also takes familiar natural icons and exposes them in new ways. "Cascade" (1984) and "Bridalveil" (1985) are both responses to the essence of the waterfall experience at Yosemite National Park. Thin stripes hold bands of subtle color and bring the sensation of water flow and energy of the falls to life. They capture their swirling mists and rushing waters not as a distant observer, but up close, as though one is about to enter their mists.

"One can do predictable things. I try to get to the core of the excitement of the experience," he said.

What: "Matt Kahn: A Commemorative Exhibition, 55 Years of Teaching at Stanford University"

Where: Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery, 435 Lasuen Mall, off Palm Drive, Stanford University

When: Tue.-Fri. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sat.-Sun. 1 to 5 p.m., through Feb. 6

Cost: Free

Info: Call (650) 723-3404 or go to www.art.stanford.edu.