PART 3 -- JULY 14 - 18, 2018: CARL RUGGLES AND ROCKWELL KENT

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 3 - Carl Ruggles & Rockwell Kent

July 14-18, 2019

ABOVE – Rockwell Kent, Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, N.Y.

During his first few years in Vermont, Kent makes brief trips to New York and meets with Ruggles, his wife, Charlotte and their son, Micah. Back in Vermont, he writes to the composer on Oct. 15, 1919. Today I begin again to paint! So it’s a great day in my life. His book with the pen and inks is being edited, designed and set it type, so now he can prepare for the 1920 show of the paintings.

From the time they meet, Kent and Ruggles not only encourage one another but also do what they can to help each other’s careers. During 1920, Ruggles is giving music lessons to Mrs. Janet MacDonald Grace, wife of the shipping magnet Joseph P. Grace of Grace Lines (Second Link). She loved Kent’s cover design for Toys – extremely beautiful, she remarks to Ruggles. Hearing that gives the composer a fine opportunity to launch forth on your behalf, he tells his friend. Kent’s painting, North Wind, is available for purchase at Knoedler’s Gallery, he tells Mrs. Grace. (Ruggles to Kent, undated 1920). That delighted the artist, and in a Dec. 26, 1920 letter Kent writes: Yes, that’s fine about Mrs. Grace looking {at} my work. Bear Glacier is sold but the North-Wind isn’t…Do take her there and telephone Mrs. Sterner in advance. God, but I need to sell a picture. Sell it for me! On Jan. 31 Ruggles responds, Mrs. Grace told me the other day that she was going to see your North Wind. I hope she will buy it for her new house. I said all I thought wise. In an Aug. 16, 1920 letter to Ruggles, Kent thanks his friend for taking Seeger to see the paintings. This is most likely musicologist Charles Seeger, the brother of poet Alan Seeger, and the father of singer Pete Seeger ( who was also a friend of Rockwell Kent's).

 BELOW -- Joseph P. Grace's obituary in the July 15, 1950 issue of the New York Times.

ABOVE -- Bear Glacier, Alaska 1919. BELOW -- North Wind, 1919

Kent offers Ruggles as a speaker at the Poetry Club in Arlington during the summer of 1920 – but the group has to vote approval.  Some club members question the composers “morality” due to his connection with the RandSchool, currently involved in a controversy. They suspect he is a proponent of “Free-Love,” whatever that means, Kent writes to him on July 17. Kent tells his friend he’s going to withdraw the offer, but work with Dorothy Canfield Fisher to arrange a benefit concert featuring Ruggles for their school. According to Schroeter’s article, the concert never happened. On the same day Kent also writes to Mrs. Hallie (Phillips) Gilchrist, the poetry club’s organizer, to withdraw the offer so as not to embarrasses her. She had been encouraging and wrote to him trying to explain the moral objections. Kent replies that the idiocy of the club-member’s assumptions against the Rand School morals is not the cause of the withdrawal. It is rather that as men we are not remotely interested in the moral regeneration of New Englanders, and as artists quite intolerant of an intrusion of morals upon Art. Anyhow the thing is too silly, isn’t it? On Aug. 3, 1920 Kent writes to Ruggles: Saw Mrs. Gilchrist again the other day. She thanked me for helping her out of a very unpleasant situation as regards you. Evidently your “free-loving” has become a settled fact in the ear lady’s mind. Said {she} thought it a pity to know anything about artists themselves; that they and their work were separate, etc. I said that I and all my friends and all I had ever associated with or heard of were out of the running for anything remotely associated with this “poetry club” or anything like it.

BELOW – Rand School article in the Oct. 10, 1920 issue of the New York Call.

Kent reflects on these times in an Aug. 26, 1966 letter to John Kirkpatrick: Carl had been giving Mrs. Grace lessons in music. Either due to his coming to Arlington to stay with me, or for other reasons, she had terminated these lessons, and they were the only support that Carl was earning at that time. Though I didn’t know Mrs. Grace, I volunteered to try to see her and urge her to continue the lessons. I recall talking with her, urgently, in her rose garden. I was asked to stay the night, and her husband having returned, I was taken horseback riding with him after breakfast the next day. For the first time in my life I was seated on a trained jumper and permitted to do some stunt jumping into and out of a small enclosure. My acquaintanceship with Grace led me eventually to asking him for passage to the Strait of Magellan on a Grace Line freighter and being signed on to the Curaca as an assistant freight clerk – with no duties and a titular salary of 256 a month, the same as that issued to the Captain’s wife, who was signed on as “stewardess,” with no duties but to share his bed with him. That trip I have recorded in my book, “Voyaging.” My recollection is that Charlotte accompanied Carl when he came to stay with me in Arlington. She remained there throughout his stay, and the three of us – Carl at the piano, Charlotte as a contralto, and I on my flute – had many pleasant musical evenings together, Carl composing flute obligatos for the German lieder that we performed.

BELOW – John Kirkpatrick’s obituary in the Nov. 9, 1991 issue of the Elmira, New York Star Gazette.

In that Aug. 26, 1966 letter to Kirkpatrick, Kent tells us more about his time in Vermont and his philosophy of education: My wife and children were staying in the gate house on the Greenwich, Connecticut, estate where Edgewood School was established, the children having been given a scholarship to that school. Mrs. {Elizabeth} Johnson was an advanced education, and the Greenwich School was one of her enterprises, though not directly under her management.

BELOW – An article about Mrs. M.L. Johnson founder of the Greenwich School that appeared in the Aug. 27, 1920 issue of the Fairhope Courier (Fairhope, Alabana). The articles give insight into the woman and the educational movement.

 In Rockwell Kent’s Egypt: Shadow & Light in Vermont (2012) Jamie Franklin writes: The three oldest Kent children enjoyed attending the local district school in Arlington during the family’s first year in Vermont, walking a three-mile round trip. However, upon the invitation of Walter Overton, Kathleen and the children spent the next three school years living in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the kids attended the Edgewood School. Overton was a teacher at the progressive institution, which encouraged open inquiry, flexibility and individually of its pupils. He considered Rockwell’s and Rocky’s time in Alaska to be a successful experiment in experiential learning. As I’ve written earlier, Kent also had connections with Carl Zigrosser and his magazine, The Modern School, and homeschools Rockie while on Fox Island. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is another influence. She helped introduce the Montessori method to the U.S., especially promoting it through home schooling, as in her novel, Understood Betsy (1916). (Kent was also influenced through his readings of William Blake, and perhaps by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile.)

BELOW – A feature article about Dorothy Canfield Feature from the May 18, 1919 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Kent and Kathleen followed Fisher’s method at “Egypt.” The children had tremendous freedom, frolicking naked at will. In his autobiography Kent writes: Long before “nudism” – that reductio ad absurdum of hygienic common sense – became a cult – we practiced it as, living in rare seclusion, we were both privileged and by the heat inclined to do. Of the children’s unintentioned, natural acceptance of their naked bodies as the norm, and of clothes as but necessities for warmth, not for concealment, their own sweet purity of mind was the reward. Other virtues flowed instinctively from this freedom, Kent writes. “Children are naturally cruel,” one hears -- but, Kent continues, It is not true – unless our children were unnatural monsters. To every living creature they showed tenderness, and an act of cruelty to the least of them they would have found abhorrent. Killing, to kill for sport, was just unthinkable. They never played at killing things or owned toy guns. These last two sentences are reminiscent of Lars Olson’s comments in Wilderness about not killing for sport but only out of necessity. Animals may be ferocious and kill, Olson says, but only for good reasons, never for fun.

ABOVE – Lars Matt Olson on Fox Island with an identified child and one of his goats. Photo from a private Kent family photo album.

By the 1950’s when Kent is writing his autobiography, It’s Me O Lord, he acknowledges how grateful he was for Ruggles in 1913 when the musician marveled at his paintings and genius during the Winona, Minnesota show – this little man so strange as to have thought me great, Kent writes. A few sentences later he adds: Far more substantial and lasting, as the years were to prove, than the friendship of the little composer, was that of my fellow employee {at the mansion construction Kent was supervising in Winona}, Alex Geckler, his good wife, Martha, of their flaxen-haired, blue-eyed little daughter, Hildegarde, and of all the Gecklers that subsequent years were to call into being. My guess is that Kent eventually lost contact with Ruggles. His 1966 -1969 correspondence with John Kirkpatrick brought back old and pleasant memories of the composer and his family, and he realized the importance of that relationship. Kent had done much to help Ruggles with his career, but certainly the composer’s admiration and faith in the artist’s genius and potential helped Rockwell as well. Kent was still experimenting with modernism during this period of his life. He may not have accepted some of the more extreme styles in art, but it is interesting that he appreciated the radical modernist movement expressed by Carl Ruggles compositions. Perhaps it was the individual he respected most -- even more than the music -- a man dedicated to his art with tremendous integrity who refused to follow the herd.

This has been somewhat of a sideways journey during my slow trek forward – a brief look into what I believe to be an important friendship for two talented men. There’s more to this story, I’m sure. I’ve only touched upon enough to perhaps make a few points. The next entries will cover the publication of Wilderness: A Journal ofQuiet Adventure in Alaska in 1920 combined with the successful show of Kent’s Alaska paintings. As I’ve written, now that Kent is in closer contact with his family and friends, it’s more difficult to find correspondence about his work. Yet, I have found a few letters he wrote to Ruggles about preparing his Alaska paintings for the exhibition.

SOURCES

For this series about the Carl Ruggles – Rockwell Kent friendship, I’ve used the standard sources I’ve already mentioned. They include An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent by David Traxel (1980); Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern by Jake Milgram Wien (2005); Rockwel Kent’s autobiography, It’s Me O Lord (1955); and Rockwell Kent’s “Egypt”: Shadow & Light in Vermont by Jamie Franklin and Jake Milgram Wien (2012.) I’m especially indebted to Joan G. Schroeter’s article in the Spring 2000 issue of The Kent Collector,  “The Ruggles-Kent Correspondence: ‘Doing the Same Thing.’”  Some of the letters quoted come from the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University, a source Schroeter used. I also want to thank Beth Christensen, whose paper – “Likely Friends in Unlikely Places” – was presented at the 2013 Rockwell Kent symposium held in Winona, Minnesota. The paper can be found AT THIS LINK along with the slide show images that went with it. Other letters quoted came from the Carl  Ruggles file in the Rockwell Kent Collection at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.