He drew every day and was inspired by military pageantry, Napoleonic Wars and prominent historical figures including Adolph Menzel and Frederick the Great.
As quotas for immigrant applications in the United States changed, Kahn was able to reunite with his family in New York City in 1940 at the age of 13.
[citation needed] In 1942, Kahn was accepted for his sophomore year at the High School of Music and Art in New York City.
They married there in March 1957 at the municipal building near the Rialto Bridge, witnessed by strangers and friends including filmmaker Tinto Brass.
[2] Surrounded from birth by the work of such artists as Hans Thoma, Carl Spitzweg, Wilhelm Trübner, Franz Winterhalter, by Edwardian furniture, books and bronzes of Schiller and Goethe, it is no wonder that Kahn started drawing at a very young age.
While at the University of Chicago, he became interested in philosophy, particularly the writings of Immanuel Kant while making sketches of sailboats riding anchor on Lake Michigan.
In the late 1960s after a number of vacations on Deer Isle, Maine, the foggy conditions ultimately led to a significant shift in Kahn's painting.
"[8] Kahn's very first exhibition was a group show titled, New Provincetown '47, curated by Clement Greenberg at the Seligmann Gallery on 57th Street in New York.
This was followed by a group exhibition in the fall of 1952 at the Hansa Gallery Cooperative, one of a few Hofmann student spinoffs.
His first one-man solo exhibition would follow in 1953, also at Hansa Gallery, after a summer trip to Louisiana where he visited his art professor brother, Peter.
Around this same time, his work was included in a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art titled Young America 1960: 30 Painters under 36.
The screenprint, entitled Aura, hangs in the Graphic Eloquence exhibit in the S. Dillon Ripley Center on the National Mall.