PART 3 - JUNE 9--14, 2019 VERMONT: A REVIEW IN THE NEW YORK SUN

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 3 - Vermont: Flight from the City
Review of Rockwell Kent’s Alaska drawings  in The NY Sun

June 9-14, 2019

VERMONT: Flight from the city

Part 3

Henry McBride’s May 11, 1919

Review of Rockwell Kent’s Alaska drawings  in The NY Sun

ABOVE – The May 11, 1919 Henry McBride review in The Sun (New York) of Rockwell Kent’s Knoedler Gallery Drawings Exhibit.

As May 1919 comes to an end, Rockwell Kent is delighted at the success of the Knoedler Gallery show of his drawings. He now has a book contracted for a publication date to coincide with a show of his Alaska paintings in early 1920. He has located the Vermont property he will name Egypt and is working to purchase it. On May 11, 1919 an enthusiastic review of the Knoedler Gallery Exhibit appears in The Sun written by prominent art critic, Henry McBride (1867-1962.). McBride was born into the period of Winslow Homer and the Hudson River School, and died in the era of the New York School, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. He began his art criticism with The Sun in 1913 reviewing the famous Armory Show. He covered the art world for that newspaper for 36 years. Initially, he was encouraged not to be “high brow” in his criticism. A year later he was told to shift to “high brow,” His open-mindedness and sense of humor gave his criticism credibility and he began to favor the avant-garde and encourage new movements. He is known for discovering and/or encouraging emerging talents like Seurat, Matisse, Kandinsky, Charles Demuth, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeff, Max Webber, and others. Yet he didn’t fully support Robert Henri’s group, The Eight. His 1919-1920 reviews of Kent’s art represented a major boost to the artist’s career. His comments about Kent appeared as the first section of several reviews. It is titled “Why Rockwell Kent Went to Alaska – and it begins like this:

McBride continues: It may be that the reader will not have known until this that Mr. Kent went to Alaska. In that case the reader must be warned that he or she could live in closer proximity to the centre of the art world than apparently he or she does, for all of US knew that Rockwell Kent went to Alaska as soon as he went. In fact we keep a close watch upon all of his doings. McBride describes Kent’s Maine and Newfoundland work, noting that these pictures embody a vigor and breadth, and an almost suspiciously easy accomplishment. But the work Kent brought back from Newfoundland was – symbolic mystical compositions, with curious ships on midnight seas, fierce lights beating upon lonely cabins where fate had just been knocking at the door, and constellations of unusual planets dotting all the skies. This turn in style even surprised Kent’s loyal friends, but they would have remained faithful to him regardless of what he did, McBride writes. But not so the general public. The critic notes that the Daniel Gallery still has most of these weird paintings. The drawings in pen and ink that began to appear about this time fared no better {and} frightened our magazine editors to death. They would not of them, in spite of the obvious decorativeness and the clean lines and solid blacks that would have made them so easy for an engraver.

BELOW -- Why Rockwell Kent Went to Alaska continued.

Rockwell Kent as an illustrator was a failure, McBride claims, but a quite interesting failure – one that his friends envy and whose career the art world follows. This period in Kent’s life, upon his return from Newfoundland in 1915, was one of the most stressful. He and Kathleen sold many of their possessions for the move to Newfoundland where they hoped to remain for years while Kent painted and established an art colony and school. The Great War had begun and Kent’s attitude and antics resulted in the entire family being ousted. They returned to New York with little money and few possessions. His good friend, George Chappell, saw that he had work at his New York architectural firm, Ewing and Chappell. Kent beat the pavement in his off time attempting to sell what he considered hack work. He had to live in New York City, but it was too expensive to house his family there so they frequently moved elsewhere in search of cheaper lodgings. His affair with Jennie Bell Sterling had ended, but a court case involving the trust he had created for her and the child they bore was a distraction for him and a reminder to Kathleen of his unfaithfulness. In the summer of 1916 Kent meets a beautiful Ziegfeld follies girl, Hildegarde Hirsch, and begins another affair. He is not secretive about these relationships. His wife is expected to become part of the trio. His friends and probably much of the art world know of Kent’s tendencies. It’s important to note here that his infidelities were hardly unique in general, especially among the intellectuals like artists and writers. This is not to defend him and diminish Kathleen’s suffering – but it was (and still is) a not uncommon behavior among men. By 1917 Kent is frustrated and despondent. His art is going nowhere, in part because he has little time to dedicate to it. Supporting his wife and four children has become a worry. Having another lover to please doesn’t help, especially since the two women don’t like each other. His love life has grown extremely complicated. But this time, Kathleen, who had just turned 18-years-old when they married in 1908 – he was 26 -- is no longer that innocent young girl. She’s now a grown woman -- not only fed up with his unfaithfulness, but also tired of constantly moving, the struggle for money, her full-responsibility for their four children, and her husband’s unrealistic expectations of her. Living in New York while Kent is in Alaska, her friends often take her to plays, concerts, and the cabaret. A talented singer and musician, before her marriage she had considered a professional career. Now, with Kent in Alaska and embedded in the New York entertainment world, she wonders what her life would have been without a husband and four children. In Alaska, Kent sees she has changed and fears he may return to not only a professional failure like he did from Newfoundland but that he also might lose his wife and family.  Rockwell married three times, and as his friend Carl Zigrosser states, he wore out the first two wives. And it is times like this – Zigrosser suggests – when Kent’s romantic life gets complicated, that he finds a way to escape on a new adventure. By 1917 Kent is planning his personal flight from the city and personal problems and is considering Alaska. So – as McBride says in his review, in late July 1918 Kent, with his eight-year-old son, Rockie, in tow (against Kathleen's wishes), the artist sailed away from chilly New York to still chillier Alaska, courting the more bearable misery…of the terrible wilderness of the North. And now he has come back.

Something happened in Alaska combined with a mood change in America. Kent’s art work now has gained in power, McBride notes – and more important, the drawings are selling. Something psychological had taken place…The indifferent public had melted, the reviewer observes. I discussed this in an earlier post. After the Great War ended and through the turmoil 1919 and 1920, the American public craved a return to simple, enduring and elemental values. The simple life and back-to-the-land movement was popular – and Kent’s drawings appealed to a return to precisely what presidential candidate Warren G. Harding promised during his campaign – a return to normalcy.

BELOW -- Opinion piece about the Great War and the Simple Life that appeared 100 years ago in the June 10, 1919 New York Evening World.

But now comes Rockwell Kent’s severest test, McBride warns – public success. It seems a time for his friends to stick closer to him than ever…Racking my brain, I can think of no single instances of an artist who has been permanently helped by fashionable applause, and I can think of many who have been shipwrecked by it. McBride relates an anecdote about poet Percy Bysshe Shelley – that when he was doing his greatest work, he wrote for five or six people only. Those “five or six” are all a serious artist needs, and if an artist be deeply serious he will sometimes address but one. Don’t surrender to faddish publish tastes, the critic warns Kent. He would repeat the same warning in reviewing the paintings in 1920. Whether or not Kent respected that attribute of Shelley’s, we don’t know. But Kent did admire the poet’s philosophy of free love. Rockwell’s first affair with Jennie Sterling resulted in the birth of their child, Karl, in 1911. The child died only a few months later, but the event had almost ended his marriage. During that summer, Kent tries to weave his two families together. As David Traxel writes in his Kent biography: Mother and child {Jennie and Karl} visited the Kent’s at Richmond {New Hampshire}; Rockwell wanted them to stay, wanted them all to become one family. The attempt failed. The women did not like the idea, really did not like one another. Kathleen’s shy innocence was irritating to the more sophisticated Janet and, though Rockwell had insisted that she could, Kathleen complained I just can’t love Janet. Kent felt he had done the right thing, later bragging to his sister {Dorothy} I tried to do what Shelley would have done. NOTE -- Traxel calls Jennie by the name of Janet because Jennie was still alive while he was researching and writing the book. Traxel had no contact with Jennie but he wanted to protect her privacy. Jennie died in 1979 the year before Traxel’s biography was published.

BELOW -- Jennie with Karl and Kathleen with Clara. This may have been taken at one of Jennie's visits to Richmond, NH with he baby. From the Rockwell Kent Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

 McBride goes on to highlight The Made Hermit series of Alaska drawings but claims that – although Kent has gone out alone at night to interrogate the heavens…tragedy has not as yet tinged his style, and it is impossible to be tragic over him or his work. Mr. Kent’s life has not been tragic, but, on the contrary, and in spite of his own words, it has been distinctly larkish. McBride is not impressed with what he perceives as Kent’s flippant arrogance – that he has burned the candle at both ends – a remark most sinners whisper in tears in the confessional.  Apparently, McBride didn’t appreciate how a tragic fishing accident in Newfoundland affected Kent’s psyche and his art. Nor does he take seriously the artist’s mere eight months in Alaska as a flight to freedom. For a time on Fox Island, Kent took a deep unpleasant dive into his soul – and it was the the darkness and the elemental Alaska wilderness combined with personal issues that drove him downward. 

Part of the problem with how Kent’s experience in Alaska has been told over the years is this: Few if any discussing Alaska, Resurrection Bay and Fox Island, have any depth of knowledge of the area. And in 1919 Alaska was even more romantically mythic than it is even today. Kent mostly idealized the isolation, terrors, hostile weather and sea conditions – especially how it affected him emotionally and psychologically. We clearly see his terror, depression, jealousy, and uncertainty in his letters from Alaska to Kathleen. But as I write this on a beautiful, clear, sunny day in early June (about 65 degrees) sitting on my south deck with a clear view of Fox Island about 13 miles away -- I'm reminded how the extreme range and rapid change in weather conditions can affect the soul. Kent did experience stunning, magnificent times on Fox Island that mixed like oil and water in his memory. As I’ve said in past entries, I challenge anyone today to spend eight months on Fox Island in the winter living under the same conditions Kent experienced and traveling back and forth to Seward in an 18-foot dory with a 3.5 horse power engine constantly breaking down. In the process, see if you have the time to write hundreds of pages of personal letters, a lengthy illustrated journal -- while producing the quantity of drawings and paintings Kent did.  All this between keeping your wood supply up, and tending to all the mundane chores necessary to keep both yourself and your young son content and safe. Few could survive. It was physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausting. It's no wonder Kent was pushed to the edge of his endurance. It is remarkable and to his credit that he used all that negative energy to produce enduring and magnificent art.

BELOW -- The Mad Hermit series, taken from Rockwell Kent: An Anthology of his Work by Fridolf Johnson (1981).

In 1919, McBride and others didn’t have access to the Alaska correspondence between Kent and both Kathleen and Hildegarde. Kent does go through anxiety and deep depression while on Fox Island – much of it of his own making. Many years later he affirmed he had wanted to experience everything life had to offer. He wanted it all. 
Kent does include a chapter in his autobiography placed just before the Alaska trip. He calls it "Transgression" -- but it only includes the affair with Hildegard, nothing about Jennie. He admits the consequences of his Hildegarde affair upon others should  be serious and, as the years should prove, enduring, but that life without such love recurrence would be desolate. How this contradiction can be solved to the best interest of society and the family, Kent admits, I have no answer; nor should one whose marriage was, through his own actions, to suffer continuous deterioration, presume to offer a solution. Kent admits that, like most human beings, he is most likely rationalizing his behavior. He offers a quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest:  One life -- but one! we have; and what a world, how varied and how vast! How it invites us, like Miranda to cry out: "O! wonder/how many goodly cretures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O  brave new world/That has such people in't. This idea is a motif that runs through Rockwell Kent's life. On Feb. 13, 1919 from Fox Island, he includes the following sketch in a letter to Kathleen. The writing says: Here we are born -- and somewhere beyond here we die -- and all the rest is lost.

In his 1955 autobiography he admits and regrets how much pain and suffering that his transgressions caused others -- especially Kathleen. He does not write about the epiphany he experiences on Fox Island, how for that brief time he truly realized how he had been treating Kathleen and how much he needed her. He hesitates to fully regret these transgressions, his need for them nor the value of sucking all the marrow out of life. More on this when he writes about his divorce.

His 16-year marriage to Kathleen covered the full spectrum of pleasure and pain, love and hate, bliss and sorrow. They loved each other and their children – though Kent often made life extremely difficult for his wife with his cruel expectations and demands. As she grew older, Kathleen fought back. She had learned his weaknesses and retaliated in her own passive aggressive way. Theirs was a true but tragic love. Thus, McBride is only half correct when he writes: Mr. Kent’s life has not been tragic, but, on the contrary, and in spite of his own words, it has been distinctly larkish. Behind the clown's mask, there often hides more tragedy than most people ever imagine. Within Rockwell's and Kathleen's letters from Alaska, we get a glimpse behind the masks. Certainly Rockwell Kent played a large part in creating the tragedies of his life. So don't we all in many ways.

McBride ends his review with both praise and a warning: The quality in the drawings that commends them is not so much profundity as pure physical exuberance. It is a cheering spectacle to see so much youthfulness, vivacity and vitality, and the exhibition cannot but be encouraging to all the young artists who will now see it. Artists have a way, too, of drinking hope from the evidence of sales, even he sales of others; but they must be warned again that such thoughts are evil, and must be put firmly aside.

At age 36, Kent was beginning to feel is age. He has had many choices to make in life, has  had to sacrifice much. Kathleen has had to make sacrifices, too. That's part of life, he believes. On Feb. 13, 1919 he writes to Kathleen. She's been wondering what her life would have been like without marriage and children. Rockwell writes: Sweetheart, I have my hours of bitterness. Do you not know that my nature is complex. That with all my (harshness) I too could love society and forever gay and jolly times, and sport, my horse, tennis, the gay seashore, dancing, the attentions of women. I am not an outcast, not one who cannot mingle with people and be liked and admired and loved.  I’m still young and strong. I have brains and charm and confidence and sex attraction. I mourn the passing of these – but I have had to choose. I mourn the flight of years, the hair gone from my head and the gray hairs on my temples. Would you have me forsake the choice I have made and be your companion in a life of play? Rockwell goes on to say that he'd be willing to give all up to keep Kathleen and the children if needed -- but that he wouldn't be the same man -- the light and spirit would be gone from my eyes. McBride notices the youthfulness, vivacity and vitality in Kent's drawings. He doesn't realize the true cost of that energy to Rockwell Kent.

BELOW -- Why Rockwell Kent Went to Alaska continued to the end.

After the review, McBride printed the Kent’s letter to his patron, Christian Brinton as it appeared in the catalogue for the Knoedler Gallery Exhibition. 

ABOVE  – An early draft of the Brenton letter --  from the Rockwell Kent Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. BELOW – The letter as it appears in The Sun.

NEXT ENTRY -- The May 31, 1919 Literary Digest article about Rockwell Kent and the Knoedler Gallery Exhibition -- and The Seward Gateway's response.