Rockwell Kent "Wilderness" Centennial Journal

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018-19 Part 2 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: 1920 July 27-Aug. 2, 2019 ABOVE – The house at “Egypt.” Photo from a private Kent family album. I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me; and to me/High mountains are a feeling, but the hum/Of human cities torture.          Lord Byron in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” When I’m not painting the very thought of it is bitter to me – I don’t know whether I’m a genius or a failure – I guess I don’t care.           Rockwell Kent to Carl Ruggles, Nov. 1919. Before I write about the opening of Rockwell Kent’s Alaska paintings exhibition with the publication of Wilderness -- and the reviews – I want to cover some of the correspondence I’ve found about his preparation for those events. I’ve quoted some of this earlier, but here I want to put the material in chronological order. On Fox Island

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018-19 Part 1 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: 1920 July 21-24, 2019 ABOVE – An ad announcing Wilderness in the March 7, 1920 New York Times . BELOW – An ad announcing the show of Kent’s paintings in the Feb. 29, 1920 New York Herald. this wholeness of essence Wilderness and the Alaska Paintings Part I Places have their identity as flowers or creatures have, their soul, or genius loci. A Place, in nature, is, after all, only a larger more complex organism, a symbiosis of many lives. All inviolate places have this wholeness of essence; their perfection lies in their remaining intact, undisturbed by intrusion of any life which does not itself participate in that harmonious organic unity…Never, in later life, do we experience that sense of perfect arrival that is, in childhood, the term of every walk; we bring the whole of ourselves to the very place, w