NEW YORK.-Lori Bookstein Fine Art announced its inaugural exhibition of the fine art of Louis I. Kahn at the Works on Paper Fair, February 29th through March 3rd. This show constitutes the first comprehensive survey of Kahn's work in over ten years.

Louis Isadore Kahn [1901–1974] was born in Estonia on the island of Saaremaa. At the age of five, his parents immigrated to the United States and he was raised in Philadelphia, which would be his home base for the rest of his life. At an early age Kahn demonstrated an aptitude for drawing, and was in fact given the choice between a scholarship in fine art or architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Although he was to choose the latter, and become one of the most important American architects of the twentieth century, Kahn's dual identity of artist and architect would remain with him always.

Like his contemporaries Stuart Davis and David Smith, Kahn was a prolific drawer. His versatility with various media, as well as his capacity for experimentation, was astounding. Given the geometric purity and monumentality he is renowned for in his architecture, the intimacy and spontaneity manifest in his artwork may seem inconsistent at first view. In truth, the two forms share Kahn's preoccupation with light and nature. Like his greatest buildings, in which structures are conceived of first and foremost as recipients and transmuters of light, Kahn's fine art is an exploration of light's transformative power over natural settings and the man made elements within them. In a passage excerpted from a 1972 lecture, Kahn delineates its fundamentality in architecture:

"I have no color applied on the walls in my home. I wouldn't want to disturb the wonder of natural light. The light really does make the room. The changing light according to the time of day and the seasons gives color. Then there are reflections from the floors, the furniture, the materials, all contributing to make my space made by the light, mine. Light is mood. The color of light is very pronounced. We know that a red light will cast a green shadow and green light will cast a red shadow. A blue light will cast a yellow shadow and a yellow light will cast a blue. It's surprising when a sunset is truly a prevailing red, not confused; you will see an inky green shadow. Ever since I knew that to be true, I grew away from painting and depended on the light. The color you get that way is not applied, but simply a surprise."

One senses, in these words, how Kahn's drawings could function both as an extension of this philosophy, and as a vital means of self-expression. His sketches are imbued with emotional responses towards the subject; they are never recordings or imitations of observations. His ethos of design transparency, of never seeking to dissemble the process of creation, is as integral to the drawings as it was to the structure of his buildings. Although Kahn, in his early stages, was certainly influenced by the American Modernists, he was nonetheless to arrive upon his own original voice.

The artworks in the exhibition, comprised of pencil, charcoal and pen and ink drawings as well as watercolors and pastels, were primarily executed during his many travels, notably to Italy (1928–29), the United States and Canada (the 1930s) and Greece and Egypt (1951). His work belongs to The Art Institute of Chicago, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Williams College Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania.

Louis Kahn's most celebrated architectural achievements include the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California (1959–65), the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1967–72), the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut (1969–74) and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–83), completed posthumously. There are no existing works by Kahn in New York City, although at the time of his death he had just completed plans for a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Inspired by the President's defense of the Four Freedoms – of speech and religion, and from want and fear – the memorial was designed as a sloping park leading to an open room on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island (renamed in its anticipation) and opening up to views of the United Nations and downtown Manhattan. The city fiscal crisis of 1975, however, put the project on hold for some three decades. A push to build the memorial has been made in the recent years, headed by City Council members and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Last fall, Governor Spitzer, Mayor Bloomberg and members of Congress officially endorsed the motion, but lack of funding continues to impede construction.