I have known Tobi Kahn for roughly 55 years. We connected almost immediately on a creative level that was difficult to define then and remains difficult to explain now. Our families’ histories reach back even further, to earlier generations in Germany. There were, from the beginning, many layers to our connection—personal, creative, historical and, in a way I have come to understand more fully over time, spiritual.
Perhaps that is why I have never experienced Tobi’s work simply as art hanging on a wall. When I stand before one of his paintings, I don’t just see it. I feel I understand what he is saying. The response is visceral—somewhere deep in the gut, before language has had a chance to intervene.
Having known him for so much of his life has also given me the unusual privilege of watching the work change as the man changed.
Kahn began as a photographer and moved through works on paper into painting, sculpture, mixed media and the creation of spaces and objects with a spiritual dimension. Some of his works are triptychs; others are large, multidimensional sculptures designed for both indoor and outdoor settings. They do not simply occupy space—they transform it, inviting viewers to move around them, encounter them from different angles and experience them physically as well as visually.
I remember periods when the work felt darker—both literally and emotionally. The palette could be sober, the forms inward-looking. Yet as his life evolved, so did the work. Relationships deepened. He married. He became a father. He became a grandfather. Gradually, I watched more light enter.
The work became more vibrant, more inviting, more alive. Loss and mortality did not disappear, but they began to coexist differently with beauty, color, landscape, intimacy and possibility.
Perhaps that is what moves me so profoundly when I encounter one of those moments in Tobi’s work where sky and water seem to meet at the horizon. For an instant, boundaries dissolve. You don’t need someone to explain what you are seeing. You get it.
The horizon is important in Kahn’s work. As the catalogue for Tobi Kahn: Quest for the Essence observes, it can simultaneously center the viewer and open the painting outward, locating us in a particular place while suggesting something timeless and limitless. Paintings separated by nearly four decades reveal one of the defining characteristics of Kahn’s career: consistency and change.
That is one reason this survey at the Boca Raton Museum of Art feels so significant to me. It offers an opportunity to see not simply decades of an internationally acclaimed artist’s work, but the evolution of a life.
Kahn began as a photographer and moved through works on paper into painting, sculpture, mixed media and the creation of spaces and objects with a spiritual dimension. Some of his works are triptychs; others are large, multidimensional sculptures designed for both indoor and outdoor settings
The artist and the search
Born in New York in 1952 to parents who had escaped Nazi-Germany, Kahn studied at Hunter College and received his MFA from Pratt Institute. A major moment in his career came in 1985, when his work was included in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s New Horizons in American Art. Over the decades that followed, his work would be exhibited widely and enter major museum and institutional collections, while some of the world’s leading private collectors have acquired multiple works by him.
Teaching has also been an important part of Kahn’s life as an artist. For nearly four decades, he has taught fine arts and visual thinking at New York’s School of Visual Arts, where his courses have ranged from painting and mixed media to refining visual language. It seems a natural extension of his own work: encouraging others not simply to look at art, but to learn how to see.
But a résumé does not explain Kahn.
The more revealing measure of his career may be the questions that have remained with him.
The catalogue describes a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, photography and sculpture, as well as ceremonial objects, intimate shrines and monumental works. Beneath that variety is a remarkable continuity. Joy exists beside reverence. Memory exists beside an intense appreciation of the present. Energy coexists with stillness.
His Judaism is essential to who he is and to the artist he became, but the work reaches beyond any single faith. Kahn himself has put the distinction succinctly: “my Jewishness informs the artist that I am, but I am an artist first.”
The paintings do not tell viewers what they must believe or even precisely what they must see. Forms derived from photographs become abstractions. Places become texture and color. Titles, created with his wife, the writer Nessa Rapoport, are invented words with an almost mystical resonance. By refusing to provide an easy reading, the work allows each viewer to make a journey of his or her own.
Perhaps that explains some of my own connection to it. I don’t need Tobi to tell me what I am supposed to see. Somehow, I recognize it.
The catalogue describes his pursuit as a search for the “essence” of places, people and things—for what remains when a form is distilled to something fundamental. Belief, memory, time and beauty intersect in that search.
And Tobi asks something more of art.
He wants it to heal.
Asked what he hopes visitors will take from the survey, Kahn offered three wishes: that they feel themselves equal participants in the experience; that they learn to look at the world less linearly; and that, even briefly, they leave feeling better about the world. Art, in this conception, can offer comfort, refuge and replenishment.
For Kahn, that belief is deeply personal.
It reaches back to a young man named Arthur Kahn.
The name he carried
Tobi’s full name is Tobi Aaron Kahn.
Aaron was his uncle Arthur’s Hebrew name.
For Kahn, the connection was therefore present from the beginning. He carried his uncle not only in family memory, but in his own name.
“It was very meaningful to me that I was named after my uncle,” Tobi says. “I have spent my life trying to create work that is both spiritual and healing.”
Once you know Arthur’s story, those words acquire another dimension.
Arthur Kahn was 21 years old in the spring of 1933, a medical student in Würzburg, Germany. He left his apartment during Easter break intending to visit relatives. His name had mistakenly been placed on a list of students suspected of Communist affiliations. He had none.
He was arrested in Nuremberg and transferred to Dachau, which had only recently opened. Hitler had been chancellor for just ten weeks.
Within 24 hours of arriving at Dachau, Arthur was dead—one of four Jewish prisoners murdered there and believed to have been the first Jewish person killed by the Nazis at Dachau.
History has a terrible way of reducing people to what happened to them.
Arthur became a “first.”
A first victim. A historical marker. A name associated with the beginning of something so enormous that the individual human being could almost disappear beneath it.
But Arthur had existed before Dachau.
He had been a son, a brother, a student. He was brilliant. He had friends. He had romances. A surviving classmate would remember him decades later as the best student in their class, “popular and respected for his quiet manner.” At his high-school graduation, where he was the class’s only Jewish student, Arthur was valedictorian. In a surviving photograph, he stands in a suit and pocket square, hand on his hip, smiling into the sunlight.
There he is, before history turned him into a victim.
A young man with a future.
Mattie’s gift
Kahn’s daughter, the writer Mattie Kahn, grew up with Arthur’s story as part of the family inheritance.
As she later wrote, these family histories can be absorbed almost before a child understands that they are history at all. “We inherited these stories as we inherited our hair colors, the shape of our faces,” she wrote.
What Mattie eventually realized, however, was that she knew the circumstances of Arthur’s death far better than she knew the young man who had lived before them.
She wanted to find him.
That search took her back through Germany—to the cities connected to Arthur’s student years, arrest and murder, and finally to Gemünden am Main, where the Kahn family had lived. She worked through archives and family correspondence, following whatever traces remained and trying to see beyond the historical record of his death.
What moves me most is that the search was never merely historical.
Mattie undertook it in part as a gift to her father.
She was trying to recover something of the person behind the name he had carried throughout his life. What she was able to give him meant the world to him.
There is a beautiful symmetry in that exchange.
Kahn had spent a lifetime carrying Arthur forward. Decades later, his daughter reached backward through history and returned some part of Arthur to him.
Her search eventually produced something tangible as well.
In Gemünden, a Stolperstein—one of the small brass memorial stones created by German artist Gunter Demnig to restore individual names to the places where victims once lived—was installed for Arthur.
And then, after the installation drew local attention, something unexpected happened.
Another photograph of Arthur surfaced.
It was his high-school graduation picture: Arthur among his classmates, smiling broadly into the sun. For Mattie, it offered something the archival record could never quite provide on its own—a glimpse of the young man before his life was overtaken by history.
“There he is,” she wrote. “The man I can almost remember.”
What we inherit
Looking at Kahn’s work now, across the sweep of this survey, I find myself thinking about inheritance differently.
We inherit names, stories, photographs and rituals. Sometimes we inherit trauma we did not experience ourselves. Sometimes we inherit questions that cannot be answered.
But inheritance is not necessarily passive.
We decide what to do with what has been handed to us.
Kahn inherited Arthur’s name and a family history marked by rupture. He created.
Mattie inherited the story. She searched.
And perhaps that is why Quest for the Essence feels like such an appropriate title for this moment in Kahn’s career. The survey is organized not simply around chronology or medium but around the connective tissue that has persisted across his work—the essence that remains even as forms, colors, subjects and circumstances change.
I have had the privilege of watching many of those changes happen.
I knew the photographer. I watched the works on paper emerge. I saw the darker work and the mixed-media pieces. I watched sculpture grow in scale and ambition. And I watched life enter the palette differently as Kahn himself moved through love, marriage, fatherhood, friendship, loss and time.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the horizon.
Sky and water.
Two expanses meeting at a line that seems definite from a distance but disappears as we approach it.
Past and present can be like that.
So can memory and imagination. Presence and absence. Grief and beauty.
After knowing Tobi for more than half a century, I can recognize those intersections not only in his art, but in the life through which that art developed.
Perhaps that is what art can do at its most profound.
It cannot undo history. It cannot return a murdered 21-year-old medical student to the family that lost him. It cannot fill every silence or answer every question.
But it can refuse disappearance.
A daughter can search.
A nephew can create.
A friend can remember.
And another person, standing before a painting decades later, can look toward a horizon where sky and water meet and feel, somewhere deep in the gut, that she understands.
The Nazis determined the circumstances of Arthur Kahn’s death.
They did not get to determine the meaning of his life.
Cover image: Tobi Kahn’s model for EMET, 2001, Meditative room installation for the HealthCare Chaplaincy, NY, Acrylic on wood,14 x 17 ¼ x 10 ¼ in. Courtesy of the artist.
