A shared passion for color: artists Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason at Wheaton

Wheaton will host an exhibition of works by noted painters Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason, from Monday, Sept. 9 through Sunday, Oct. 20. The artists, who received honorary degrees from Wheaton in 2000, are the first to be featured in a major exhibition in the Beard and Weil galleries, which opened last spring following a $20 million arts construction and renovation project at Wheaton.

Although the two artists have been married for 45 years, Kahn and Mason have rarely shared the same exhibition space. The pair pursue distinctly different styles of paintingKahn fuses the representational and the abstract in landscapes while Mason produces vibrant non-objective paintingsand they maintain separate professional lives.

However, hang the couple's works in the same space and the dialogue that undoubtedly has animated their life together is echoed in the pair's paintings, prints and pastels. Art lovers will have the opportunity to see the conversation for themselves this fall in a special exhibition at the Beard and Weil galleries at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass.

''Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason have more in common than initially meets the eye,'' writes Professor of Art Ann Murray in the catalog that will accompany their show. ''Both are moved by the natural world and translate its vitality into pictorial form by mining the full potential of color.''

A member of the second New York School, Kahn is one of America's leading landscape painters who paints in the style of an Abstract Expressionist. Also an influential artist, Mason's work has led the way for a younger generation of artists who now call themselves ''process painters.'' Works by Kahn and Mason are in the collections of numerous museums as well as private collectors.

Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany, where his father was conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra. Wolf arrived in the United States in 1940 at the age of 12. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in New York in 1945, he spent thirteen months in the Navy. After that he studied painting with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, and in 1951, graduated from the University of Chicago.

Mason was born in New York City, into a family with a long artistic lineage. Her mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, was an important pioneer of geometric abstraction beginning in 1929, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and a descendant of John Trumbull, one of the great American painters of the late eighteenth-century. She was graduated from the High School of Music and Art, studied painting at Bennington College from 1950 to 1952, and thereafter at Cooper Union, New York.

Kahn will deliver a lecture titled ''Six Good Reasons Not To Paint a Landscape'' as part of the exhibition opening reception on Thursday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. in Watson Fine Arts. (Gallery hours are 12:30 to 4:30 p.m., Monday-Saturday). For more information, contact Betsy Cronin, program coordinator for the arts, 508-286-3644.or via e-mail at bcronin@wheatoncollege.edu.

Wolf Kahn will deliver a lecture titled ''Six Good Reasons Not To Paint a Landscape'' as part of the exhibition opening reception on Thursday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. in Watson Fine Arts. (Gallery hours are 12:30 to 4:30 p.m., Monday-Saturday).