Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882 – March 13, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor and adventurer.

Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, the same year as fellow American artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Kent was of English descent. Kent lived much of his early life in and around New York City where he attended the Horace Mann School. In his mid-40s he moved to an Adirondack farmstead that he called Asgaard where he lived and painted until his death. Kent studied with several influential painters and theorists of his day. He studied composition and design with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League in the fall of 1900, and he studied painting with William Merritt Chase each of the three summers between 1900 and 1902, after which he entered in the fall of 1902 Robert Henri's class at the New York School of Art, which Chase had founded. During the summer of 1903 in Dublin, New Hampshire, Kent was apprenticed to painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer. An undergraduate background in architecture at Columbia University prepared Kent for occasional work in the 1900s and 1910s as an architectural renderer and carpenter. At the Art Students League he would meet and befriend the artists Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and Thomas Furlong.

Kent's early paintings of Mount Monadnock and New Hampshire were first shown at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1904, when Dublin Pond was purchased by Smith College. In 1905 Kent ventured to Monhegan Island, Maine, and found its rugged and primordial beauty a source of inspiration for the next five years. His first series of paintings of Monhegan were shown to wide critical acclaim in 1907 at Clausen Galleries in New York. These works form the foundation of his lasting reputation as an early American modernist, and can be seen in museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Among those critics lauding Kent was James Huneker of the Sun who praised Kent's athletic brushwork and daring color dissonances. (It was Huneker who deemed the paintings of The-eight as "decidedly reactionary".) In 1910, Kent helped organize the Exhibition of Independent Artists, and in 1911 together with Arthur B. Davies he organized An Independent Exhibition of the Paintings and Drawings of Twelve Men, referred to as "The Twelve" and "Kent's Tent". Painters Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Max Weber (but not John Sloan, Robert Henri, or George Bellows) participated in the 1911 exhibition.

A transcendentalist and mystic in the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, whose works he read, Kent found inspiration in the austerity and stark beauty of wilderness. After Monhegan, he lived for extended periods of time in Winona, Minnesota (1912–1913), Newfoundland (1914–15), Alaska (1918–19), Vermont (1919–1925), Tierra del Fuego (1922–23), Ireland (1926), and Greenland (1929; 1931–32; 1934–35). His series of land and seascapes from these often forbidding locales convey the Symbolist spirit evoking the mysteries and cosmic wonders of the natural world. "I don't want petty self-expression", Kent wrote, "I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity."

Asgaard Farm, Mountain Road, Jay, New York
"And there, westward and heavenward, to the high ridge of Whiteface northward to the northern limit of the mountains, southward to their highest peaks, was spread the full half-circle panorama of the Adirondacks. It was as if we had never seen the mountains before."
—This Is My Own, Rockwell Kent.

In the late summer of 1918, Kent and his nine-year-old son ventured to the American frontier of Alaska. Wilderness (1920), the first of Kent's several adventure memoirs, is an edited and illustrated compilation of his letters home. The New Statesman (London) described Wilderness as "easily the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass was published." Upon the artist's return to New York in March 1919, publishing scion George Palmer Putnam and others, including Juliana Force—assistant to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney—implemented their avant-garde notion of incorporating the artist as "Rockwell Kent, Inc." to support him in his new Vermont homestead while he completed his paintings from Alaska for exhibition in 1920 at Knoedler Galleries in New York. Kent's small oil-on-wood-panel sketches from Alaska—uniformly horizontal studies of light and color—were exhibited at Knoedler's as "Impressions." Their artistic lineage to the small and spare oil sketches of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), which are often entitled "Arrangements," underscores Kent's admiration of Whistler's genius.

Approached in 1926 by publisher R. R. Donnelley to produce an illustrated edition of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast, Kent suggested Moby-Dick instead. Published in 1930 by the Lakeside Press of Chicago, the three-volume limited edition (1,000 copies) filled with Kent's haunting black-and-white pen/brush and ink drawings sold out immediately; Random House produced a trade edition which was also immensely popular. A previously obscure book, Moby-Dick had been rediscovered by critics in the early 1920s. The success of the Rockwell Kent illustrated edition was a factor in its becoming recognized as the classic it is today.

Kent's studio at Asgaard Farm, Au Sable Forks, New York

Rockwell Kent photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933

Less well known are Kent's talents as a jazz age humorist. As the gifted pen-and-ink draftsman "Hogarth, Jr.", Kent created a wealth of whimsical and irreverent drawings published by Vanity Fair, New York Tribune, Harper's Weekly, and the original Life. He brought his Hogarth, Jr., style to a series of richly colored reverse paintings on glass which he completed in 1918 and exhibited at Wanamaker's Department Store. (Two of these glass paintings are in the collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, part of the bequest of modernist collector Ferdinand Howald.) Further decorative work ensued intermittently: in 1939, Vernon Kilns reproduced three series of designs drawn by Kent (Moby Dick, Salamina, Our America) on its sets of contemporary china dinnerware. Among his many contributions between the world wars to the world of publishing, for both an elite and a popular audience, are his pen, brush, and ink drawings that were reproduced on the covers of the upmarket pulp magazine Adventure in 1927.

Raymond Moore, founder and impresario of the Cape Playhouse and Cinema in Dennis, Massachusetts, contracted with Rockwell Kent for the design of murals for the cinema, but the work of transferring and painting the designs on the 6,400-square-foot (590 m2) span was done by Kent's collaborator Jo Mielziner (1901–1976) and a crew of stage set painters from New York City. Ostensibly staying away from the state of Massachusetts to protest the Sacco and Vanzetti executions of 1927, Kent did in fact venture to Dennis in June 1930 to spend three days on the scaffolding, making suggestions and corrections. The signatures of both Kent and Mielziner appear on opposite walls of the cinema.

As World War II approached, Kent shifted his priorities, becoming increasingly active in progressive politics. In 1937, the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the U.S. Treasury commissioned Kent, along with nine other artists, to paint two murals in the New Post Office building at the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC; the two murals are named "Mail Service in the Arctic" and "Mail Service in the Tropics." Kent included (in Inuit dialect and in tiny letters) a polemical statement in the painting, which caused some consternation. In 1939, he joined the Harlem Lodge of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization devoted to the social and economic welfare of the working public.

Kent's patriotism never waned in spite of his often critical views of American foreign policy. He remained America's premier draftsman of the sea, and during World War II he produced a series of pen/brush and ink maritime drawings for American Export Lines and began another series of pen/brush and ink drawings for Rahr Malting Company which he completed in 1946. The drawings were reproduced in To Thee!, a book Kent also wrote and designed celebrating American freedom and democracy and the important role immigrants play in constructing American national identity. In 1948 Kent was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and in 1966 he became a full Academician.

In the 1950s Kent became increasingly supportive of Soviet-American friendship, peace, and a world devoid of nuclear weapons. Along with hundreds of other prominent intellectuals and creative artists in America, he became a target of those in league with Joseph McCarthy. The rise of abstract expressionism cast a further shadow over his art and representational painting in general. Kent's passport was revoked by the U.S. State Department in 1955, and he filed suit to regain his foreign-travel rights. In June 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court in Kent v. Dulles affirmed his right to travel by declaring the ban a violation of his civil rights. After a well-received exhibition of his work in Moscow at the Pushkin Museum in 1957–58, Kent donated several hundred of his paintings and drawings to the Soviet peoples in 1960. He subsequently became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts and in 1967 the recipient of the International Lenin Peace Prize. Kent specified that his prize money be given to the women and children of Vietnam, both North and South. (The nature of Kent's gift is clarified by his wife Sally in the 2005 documentary Rockwell Kent, produced and written by Fred Lewis.)

Painter Jamie Wyeth in the 2010s conceived a series of paintings referencing untoward occurrences on Monhegan Island. One of them was entitled Portrait of Rockwell Kent and portrays the artist in the foreground holding his palette and brush, with a tiny figure falling off a cliff in the distance. Although the scene is a wintry one and Kent was not on the island at the time, the painting nevertheless connects Kent with the mid-summer disappearance and death of 49-year-old Sally Maynard Moran, a longtime friend and model Kent sketched in the early 1920s. In the summer of 1953, as her marriage to advertising executive Daniel Moran was coming to an end, Moran accepted an invitation from Kent and his wife Sally to stay at the cottage they owned on Monhegan. Although Rockwell and Sally Kent were not in residence, Kent's eldest daughter Kathleen and her two children stayed with Moran for part of her time there. On the evening of July 9, Moran went out for a walk and did not return. Three weeks later her body was found in the ocean by fishermen. The mysterious incident, in which Kent and his family were not implicated, contributed to the sale of the Kent home on Monhegan.

When Kent died of a heart attack in 1971, The New York Times described him as "... a thoughtful, troublesome, profoundly independent, odd and kind man who made an imperishable contribution to the art of bookmaking in the United States." Richer, more accurate accounts of the scope of the artist's influential career as a painter and writer have since superseded this cursory summing-up of an American life. Retrospectives of the artist's paintings and drawings have been mounted, most recently by The Rooms in St. John's, Newfoundland, where the exhibition Pointed North: Rockwell Kent in Newfoundland and Labrador was curated by Caroline Stone in the summer of 2014. Other recent exhibitions include the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery and Owen D. Young Library at St. Lawrence University (Canton, New York) in the autumn of 2012; the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, Maine) during the spring through autumn of 2012; the Bennington Museum in Vermont during the summer of 2012; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring through summer of 2012. An exhibition marking the centennial of Kent's time in Winona, Minnesota, took place there in 2013. Among the many notes of increasing awareness of Kent's contributions to American culture is the reproduction of one of Kent's pen-and-ink drawings from Moby Dick on a U.S. postage stamp, part of the 2001 commemorative panel celebrating such American illustrators as Maxfield Parrish, Frederic Remington, and Norman Rockwell.

Noted American and Canadian writers in recent years have found much gold to mine in Kent's improbable personal and public life. The year he spent in Newfoundland, for example, is fictionally (and very loosely) recalled by Canadian writer Michael Winter in The Big Why, his 2004 Winterset Award-winning novel. And certain qualities of the protagonist of Russell Banks's 2008 novel The Reserve are inspired by aspects of Kent's complex personality. Kent's work also figures in Steve Martin's 2010 novel An Object of Beauty and is the subject of a chapter in Douglas Brinkley's 2011 history The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom: 1879–1960.

The Archives of American Art is the repository for Kent's voluminous correspondence.

Bookplate designed by Rockwell Kent

Bookplate illustration by Kent

Bookplate by Kent for the Rochester Branch of the New York Public Library

Cape Cinema Interior with murals by Rockwell Kent and Jo Mielziner, Dennis, Massachusetts.

Written and illustrated by Rockwell Kent

Kent was a prolific writer whose adventure memoirs and autobiographies include:

• Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska — Memoir of the fall and winter of 1918/19 painting and exploring with his eldest son on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska (1920) [filled with the artist's pen/brush and ink drawings];
• Voyaging Southwards from the Strait of Magellan – Memoir of 1922–23 travels in and around Tierra del Fuego (1924) [filled with the artist's pen/brush and ink drawings];
• N by E — Memoir of the summer 1929 voyage to (and shipwreck on the rocks of) Greenland (1930) [filled with the artist's pen/brush and ink drawings as well as several wood engravings];
• Rockwellkentiana – Few words and many pictures by Rockwell Kent and Carl Zigrosser, A bibliography and list of prints, Harcourt, Brace & Co. (1933);
• Salamina – Memoir of his first Arctic winter (1931–32) painting and exploring while based in the tiny settlement of Illorsuit, Greenland (1935) [filled with the artist's pen/brush and ink drawings as well as several conte crayon portrait drawings];
• This is My Own – autobiography, focusing on the years 1928–1939 in Au Sable Forks, Adirondacks (1940) [filled with the artist's pen/brush and ink drawings];
• It's Me, O Lord – full-scale autobiography (1955);
• Of Men and Mountains Ausable Forks: Asgaard Press, 1959, printed by the press of A. Colish, Mount Vernon, NY;
• Greenland Journal – the author's original diaries from Igdlorssuit, Greenland, 1962, New York, Ivan Obolensky [filled with the artist's pen/brush and ink drawings];
• After Long Years Ausable Forks: Asgaard Press, 1968, printed by the press of A. Colish, Mount Vernon, edn. of 250 copies, signed by the author.

Illustrated by Rockwell Kent

• "The Seven Ages of Man", portfolio of 4 linecut reproductions after pen/brush and ink drawings, each signed and mounted, contained in paper cartridge wrappers with an illustrated cover label dated 1918, limited to 100 numbered copies;
• The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 12 volumes, Translated into English by Arthur Machen, preface by Arthur Symons, Aventuros Society, Flying Stag Press, New York (1925) 12 Frontispieces are pen, brush, and ink drawings photomechanically reproduced as engravings with a diecast stamp on each spine;
• Candide – Voltaire (1928) pen and ink drawings;
• The Bookplates & Marks of Rockwell Kent (1929) Random House, edition of 1250 signed, numbered copies;
• Moby-Dick – Herman Melville (1930) pen, brush, and ink drawings (often inaccurately described as woodcuts);
• The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, two volume set in slipcase, Albert and Charles Boni, New York (1932) 8 pen, brush, and ink drawings photomechanically reproduced as engravings;
• Beowulf [1] lithographs;
• Gabriel, A Poem in One Song by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Max Eastman, NY: Covici-Friede, 1929, edn. of 750, numbered copies;
• City Child – poetry by Selma Robinson pen and ink drawings;
• The Mountains Wait – dust jacket only;
• Seed – novel by Charles Norris – dust jacket, binding;
• Zest – novel by Charles Norris – dust jacket, binding;
• Candy – novel by Lillie McMakin Alexander (1934) pen, brush, and ink drawings;
• Leaves of Grass – poetry by Walt Whitman (1936) pen, brush, and ink drawings;
• Erewhon – novel by Samuel Butler;
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey – novel by Thornton Wilder;
• Faust – by Goethe pen, brush, and ink drawings;
• Paul Bunyan – novel by Esther Shephard pen, brush, and ink drawings;
• A Treasury of Sea Stories – anthology edited by Gordon C. Aymar pen, brush, and ink drawings;
• Gisli's Saga – Mediaeval Icelandic saga;
• Autumn Leaves – social commentary by P W Litchfield;
• To Thee! - a centennial history of Rahr Malting Company and a paean to American freedom and democracy (1946) - pen, brush, and ink drawings
• Canterbury Tales pen, brush, and ink drawings;
• The Decameron – novel by Giovanni Boccaccio translated by Richard Addington, Garden City Press, NY (1949) pen, brush, and ink drawings;
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
• End papers for The Modern Library books under the editorship of Bennett Cerf.

Murals by or designed by Rockwell Kent

• The Cape Cinema Murals, Dennis, MA (1930), designed by Rockwell Kent, executed by Jo Mielziner (1901–1976) and a crew of stage set painters from New York City, finished by Kent;
• United States Post Office Department Headquarters, Washington DC (1938);
• 1939 World's Fair mural for the General Electric pavilion;
• "America at Peace" located in the House Committee on Natural Resources "Walter B. Jones" Hearing Room, 1334 Longworth House Office Building, US Capitol Complex, Washington D.C.

Other works designed by Rockwell Kent

• 1939 Christmas Seal; National Tuberculosis Association