Flowers Against Blue Bay

Flowers Against Blue Bay was painted in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Wolf Kahn and his future wife, the artist Emily Mason, spent their first summer together amidst other artists including Milton Avery and Mark Rothko. Kahn later recalled that his happiest summer was "the one spent courting my wife in Provincetown in 1956, living in an upstairs apartment overlooking the bay." (M. Kahn, "Wolf Kahn's Provincetown Stories," Provincetown Independent, April 9, 2020) The summer proved important not just for Kahn's personal life but also for his career; his painting In the Harbor of Provincetown (1956) was soon after acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.