WOLF KAHN’S AMERICA: AN ARTIST’S TRAVELS, by Wolf Kahn, introduction by John Updike, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 168 pages, hardbound. $45.

“Wolf Kahn is a painter who loves paint.” That’s how Alan Gussow described the German-born, Hans Hofmann-trained artist in his classic book “A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Land” (1970). Gussow also noted that Kahn was a traveler: “Over the years he has experienced a wide range of environments – Louisiana, Mexico, Venice, Cape Cod, Maine, Rome and Milan.”

“Wolf Kahn’s America” focuses on the peregrinations of the painter in his adopted country. For someone who admits not enjoying travel – as an 11-year-old he was a refugee and was forced to travel, “to avoid terrible troubles” – Kahn has been around, from the Atlantic Seaboard to the West Coast and many points in between. He teaches at a variety of workshops and also reaps the benefits of hospitable friends.

New England represents a major source of material, from Little Compton, R.I., to Kahn’s farm near Brattleboro, Vt., to the coast of Maine. The latter is represented by more than a dozen paintings, a number of them made while teaching art workshops at the Rock Gardens Inn near Bath.

Kahn’s Maine coastal motifs include fog, glacial erratics, deep blue waters (that could, the artist says, induce hypothermia), lobster boats in Friendship and the parking lot of The Taste o’ Maine restaurant near Wiscasset. Among the most abstract pieces in the book is “View to Eagle Island, Maine,” a Guston-like canvas painted in 1963 while Kahn and his wife summered in Stonington.

Kahn paints the varied American landscape in pastels and oils (and oils that sometimes look like pastels). He practices a heightened palette, which John Updike, in his introduction, states, “must be seen to be believed.” Magentas, purples and peachy orange-pinks are among his mainstays. Kahn admits that he tries to make colors “go further,” to wallow in “coloristic blatancy,” even when the whole landscape, as he describes it, “becomes Pepto-Bismol.”

This man of art is also a man of words, able to keep us entertained as we peruse his colorful images. He offers anecdotes, personal observations and foibles. He recalls discussing the beauty of rain on the New Mexico desert with Robert Redford and getting into an aesthetic brouhaha with Fairfield Porter, who refused to “censor” his landscape when Kahn suggested he leave out a gas tank in the foreground of a landscape he was working on.

On a number of occasions, Kahn relates the misfires of commissioned works. Patrons wishing for a portrait of their house or of a particular vista end up with something less grandiose. As the artist once eloquently stated, “I’m after fidelity to the small context.”

Kahn’s best-known motif is the barn, a humble subject that nonetheless has great resonance. “A New England barn is to us as a Greek temple was to Poussin,” the artist observed years ago, “a symbol of a whole tradition, laden with all kinds of good associations.” At the same time, as the painter relates in his new book, he runs the danger of being dogged by his penchant, with dealers entering his studio with one question on their lips, “Got any barns?” A half dozen examples are reproduced here, including a green barn in Virginia on the cover of the book.

Wolf Kahn’s “America” is not exactly armchair travel. You may recognize a landscape here and there (such as the Oxbow near Mount Holyoke), but without the titles and commentary, many of these views are transfigured beyond easy identification. As Updike notes, Kahn’s images “keep a sense of place and moment, though what strikes us first is their abstract gorgeousness.” And strike us, they do.

Carl Little can be reached at little@acadia.net.