biography

Born in Vienna in 1905, Louis Kahan began sketching at an early age, using as subjects the visitors to his father's tailoring business, including many well known musical identities of the time. Expected by his family to take part in the business, Kahan obtained his Master Tailor's Diploma, and was introduced to the skills and motifs which would later profoundly inform his art.

At twenty Kahan left Vienna for Paris, where he found work with couturier Paul Poiret, first as a tailor, then designer. During this period Kahan came into contact with several heroes of the contemporary art world, including Matisse, Vlaminck and Dufy.

With the outbreak of war in 1939 Kahan enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and was sent to North Africa as an army artist. In 1942, while working as an interpreter and draughtsman for the US Army, he staged his first solo exhibition in Oran.

From 1943 until 1945 Kahan worked as a voluntary artist for the Red Cross, making portraits of wounded servicemen in French and American hospitals. This experience developed his ability to capture the essence of his subject in a minimum of time.

After the war Kahan returned to Paris, where he studied and made his first prints while working as an illustrator at Le Figaro.

In 1947 he travelled across the USA before arriving in Perth, where his parents and sister had earlier settled, and where he learned to paint the Australian cityscape. Three years later, Kahan moved to Melbourne. Over the next few years Kahan extended his artistic repertoire from painting and printmaking to include designing stained glass. He also revisited the theatrical encounters of his Viennese youth in designing costumes and stages for the National Theatre Company, the Australian Opera, and later, the National Welsh Opera Company. In 1954, aged 49, Kahan married Lily Isaac, and with the advent of fatherhood, became fascinated with sketching children at play, and tranquil scenes of mother and child.

In 1962 Kahan's dedication to portraiture was rewarded with the Archibald Prize, for his painting of Patrick White. This was one of many portraits Kahan was to make of Australian and international cultural figures, including Geoffrey Blainey, Judy Cassab, Manning Clark, Arthur Boyd, Dame Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti and Yehudi Menuhin. Having never received formal art training, Kahan has attributed his talent for portraiture and life drawing to knowledge of the human form acquired through early association with the tailor's mannequin.

Throughout his career, Kahan has defied demarcations between art, design and tailoring. His early profession has continued to impact on his art, to the point at which his unbroken line drawings emerge as randomly arranged threads, and tools of the trade become subjects. In ever-changing and developing combinations of style and material, Kahan has counterbalanced images of Australian and European cultural, urban, military and domestic life.

Kahan's works can be found in all major Australian galleries, as well as several overseas, including the Biblioteche Nationale in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the US Army Center for Military History in Washington, DC. In 1993 Louis Kahan was made an officer of the Order of Australia. Louis Kahan died at his home in Kew in 2002 at the age of 97.

Louis shared his passion for life and art with those around him; his contribution as an artist and as a person was given unstintingly from the storehouse of his great experience and understanding.

He was devoted to his family; his work inspired by his wife Lily, his daughters Rachelle and Dena, and his grandchildren Tal and Ronit. We are fortunate indeed to have both our memories of a man who lived a full and generous life, and his works of art, created with such skill and dedication.