Diana Greenwold pays tribute to Wolf Kahn and Duane Paluska

With the world in the midst of cataclysmic disaster, the loss of individuals who lived long, full, and enriching lives can sometimes get subsumed by the headlines.

The American art world and the Maine arts community lost two beloved artists over the last couple of weeks. In this moment of global challenge, we do not want to miss the chance to pay tribute to Wolf Kahn and Duane Paluska: two men whose contributions greatly enriched our institution, our state, and our nation. We will miss them greatly.

Wolf Kahn (United States, 1927-2020), East Penobscot Bay, 1961-1963, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches.

Wolf Kahn was an abstract painter whose beautiful work, East Penobscot, was featured in our 2019 exhibition, In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-1969. Kahn and his wife Emily Mason both had close ties to Haystack. Mason was part of the first group of scholarship students at the school in 1952 and she returned with Kahn when he taught painting a decade later. Both he and Mason were critical to our research and their foundation generously helped support the exhibition. Wolf welcomed my co-curator Rachael Arauz and I into his studio with open arms on more than one occasion. His warm demeanor and sustained enthusiasm for the Haystack exhibition buoyed us and provided new ways to expand the story of art and craft in concert at mid-century.

Duane Paluska was a stalwart member of the Maine arts community. In addition to creating beautifully constructed and abstracted forms in sculpture, painting, and print work, Duane founded Icon Contemporary Art in Brunswick, Maine, where he promoted artists such as Duncan Hewitt, Mark Wethli, Tom Burckhardt, and Andrea Sulzer for over 30 years. A former English professor at Bowdoin, Duane was as thoughtful and incisive in writing and speaking as he was in his own artistic practice. His understated yet whole-hearted commitment to the Maine art world will be felt decades to come.

I will always remember my first meeting with Duane in his workshop in Brunswick, where we discussed of the work of his long-time friend, sculptor Duncan Hewitt. I was a brand new curator working on an exhibition of Duncan’s work, my first show on my own. Over the course of a few hours, Duane’s lyrical and far-reaching musings on wood carving, sculptural practice, and literary themes unfurled and changed how I approached the project, giving me license to look at Hewitt’s work in a whole new light. Paluska reveled in his friend’s attention to craftsmanship, but also in Hewitt’s unflagging intellect and searching through the process of creation—qualities Duane no doubt admired because he too possessed them in spades. Having spoken over the last few weeks to so many of Paluska’s friends and admirers in Maine and beyond, I can say that there are many of us that already miss Duane’s measured eloquence dearly.