For more than fifty years, Spanierman Gallery cultivated a reputation as one of the country’s preeminent galleries dedicated to American Art. Founded by Ira Spanierman in 1961, the gallery initially offered a wide selection of material, including silver, arms and armor, Old Master, European and American art. Over time, Spanierman chose to focus exclusively on American art, a move that would establish the gallery as a tour-de-force in the field. Well-known for his outstanding ‘eye’ and dedication to connoisseurship, Spanierman was trusted by institutions and private collectors alike. The gallery was known to have sold to hundreds of museums across the United States and abroad while fostering the development of some of the country’s most prestigious private collections.
In addition to its reputation as a dealer, Spanierman Gallery was esteemed in the industry for its dedication and support of art scholarship. As a young man starting off in the business, Ira Spanierman recalled researching and identifying paintings through tedious research at the Frick Art Reference Library. These hours of study left an indelible mark on Spanierman who would go on to publish catalogue raisonnés for artists such as Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, Willard Metcalf, and co-sponsor the catalogue on the work of Winslow Homer.
When Spanierman Gallery closed in 2014 an impressive inventory remained. We are pleased to be offering a selection of these works in our upcoming auctions. Paintings and sculpture by artists such as John Haberle, Childe Hassam, Walter Schofield, Ibram Lassaw, Theodoros Stamos, George Segal and Patrick Procter among others, will be offered over two days. The sales also features work from a few of the estates acquired by the gallery, such as: Burgoyne Diller, Gershon Benjamin, Hayley Lever, Charles Warren Eaton, Sears Gallagher and Abraham Bogdanove.
Wolf Kahn 1927–2020
Born in Germany, Wolf Kahn immigrated to the United States in 1940 and attended the High School of Music & Art in New York before joining the Navy. Thanks to the GI Bill, after his time in the military he was able to study with renowned Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann and would later become Hofmann’s studio assistant. Khan then attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and promptly dedicating himself to becoming a full-time artist. He and several of Hofmann’s other students established a cooperative gallery, Hansa Gallery, where Kahn held his first public exhibition. It was not long before he joined Grace Borgenicht Gallery in 1956, where he exhibited regularly until 1995.
Khan and his wife, painter Emily Mason, married in 1957 and traveled extensively in addition to maintaining a farm in Vermont where they spent the summer and fall every year. The myriad of locales he visited—from Egypt to Greece, Italy to Kenya—inspired his unique and colorful landscape paintings that reflected a fusion of disparate influences: Hans Hofmann’s abstraction, Matisse’s palette, Rothko’s application of color, and American Impressionist atmosphere. Khan was the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Medal of Arts from the U.S. State Department. His work was, and continues to be, exhibited at galleries and museums across the country and can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among many others.
