AUG. 3 - 6, 2018 PART 3: WILDERNESS & THE ALASKA PAINTINGS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 3 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings

“The Mountain Behind the Mountain”

Aug. 3–6, 2019

ABOVE – The cover of the exhibition brochure for Rockwell Kent’s painting exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery. Read the quote from Dostoevsky, and note how it ties into the quote below and other suggestions about “the mountain behind the mountain.”

THE MOUNTAIN BEHIND THE MOUNTAIN

The mountain behind or within the mountain is not the perfect or ideal mountain in some Platonic sense. Neither is it that mythical Mount of Parnassus on which the Muses dwell. Nor yet is it the Holy Mountain in which God reveals himself in theophany or transfiguration…No, it is very ordinary, very physical, very material mountain, a place of sheep and kine, of peat and of streams that one might fish in or bathe in on a summer’s day. It is an elemental mountain, of earth and air and water and fire, of sun and moon and wind and rain. What makes it special…is that it is a place of Presence and a place of presences. Only those who can perceive this in its ordinariness can encounter the mountain behind the mountain.

         Noel Dermot O’Donoghue in The Mountain Behind the Mountain: Aspects of Celtic Tradition(1993)

During late September, early October 1918, Rockwell Kent while on Fox Island is reading A Literary History of Ireland: from Earliest Times to the Present Day by Douglas Hyde who in 1938 at age 78 would become the first President of the Catholic Irish Republic. On Oct. 3 Kent read The Deirdre Saga and commented: It must be one of the most beautiful and the most perfect stories in all the world. So little do we feel ourselves related, here in this place, to any other time or to any civilization that at a thought we and our world become whom and what we please. Rockwell has been a cave dweller hunting the primeval forest with stone hatchet and a bow of alder strung with a root. To me it is the heroic age in Ireland.

ABOVE – Deirdre and Naoise. Photo source and story summary.

In O’Donoghue’s Mountain Behind the Mountain, he writes that Douglas Hyde was one of two great Irishmen who flourished around the turn of the 19^th century. (The other man was Alexander Carmichael). Hyde was an Anglican scholar who eventually became President of the Catholic Irish Republic, and spent much of his life collecting and writing about ancient Irish lore and spirituality. Two of his other works are Danta Gra Cuige Connacht (Love Songs of Connaught) and Danta Diaga Cuige (Religious Songs of Connaught). Kent is absorbing this tradition of Celtic spirituality while reading Hyde. It blends nicely into this mystic period of his life.

In Rockwell Kent’s Forgotten Landscapes (1998) Scott Ferris writes that the human figures the artist uses in his Alaska works -- uses as a metaphor for natural phenomena or something spiritual, is often assumed to reflect the artist’s appreciation of William Blake’s work. Ferris doesn’t deny Blakes influence on Kent, but finds a more direct relationship between these “spiritual” or “mystical” figures and northern mythology. It was Abbott Thayer, Kathleen’s uncle and one of Kent’s teachers, who introduced him to Nordic folklore and sagas. In a footnote, Ferris writes that in his autobiography, Kent notes that it was specifically Njal’s Saga that inspired him to travel to northern climes like Alaska. We see that, for example, in North Wind and in Superman.

ABOVE – Tapestry in the Skogasafn Museum depicting Gunnarr and Hallgerour meeting at the Alping. Photo source and summary of the Njáls Saga at this link. Another summary at this link.

The influence of Blake and Nietzsche is all too obvious, and was pointed out by the first critics. I agree with Ferris about the Nordic influence and further suggest that Celtic lore and sagas also played a part in Kent’s work. In The Mountain Behind the Mountain, O’Donoghue’s describes a perception that reveals a hidden world from both the world of everyday observation and from that opened by the way of rational and reasonable thinking and contemplation. He goes on to say that those who see that “mountain behind the mountain” are those who are willing to be open to the possibility that there is a region or regions of reality which are discovered by way of an imaginative perception that is not simply projective but delicately and profoundly receptive, receptive of a world or worlds of realty normally concealed so as to give space and place to our faculties of observation and thinking.

That space and place O’Donoghue describes is the “presence” Rockwell Kent experienced on Fox Island. What do I mean by the light of imagination, and what kind of reality does it reveal? O’Donoghue writes. To the senses it says: listen to the Presence, feel it, touch it, breath it in. To the intellect it says: open up beyond the heavy material world to see a Presence and presences that refuse to be controlled by your limiting categories, a Presence that you are longing to encounter and affirm, for it enriches and completes the meaning, the rational, of creation.

ABOVE -- View from the ruins of the Kent cabin site, looking south. Capra photo.

This is – I contend – why Fox Island represents the turning point of Kent’s carrier. Sometimes it takes extreme isolation and suffering to sweep away the dust in one’s  eyes and mind. During this mystical period of Kent’s life, I suggest he sees the mountain behind the mountain – and more important – he succeeds in expressing this vision in his work. Not only that –as I wrote earlier – this exceptional art appears before the public at just the right time. The world and national psyche is wounded and exhausted by the Great War and the Influenza Epidemic. In many ways these events wiped the slate clean of the 19^th century. The world will never be the same Like airborne seeds, most new ideas that stir the violence and excessive reaction after the war had been disbursed before that conflict. Some are so radical for the times that they demand a purging before they can find fertile ground. The war and the flu are the advancing glaciers that plow away the past. The years 1919 and 1920 are traumatic to the U.S. with strikes and bombings. We see the rise of anti-emigrant sentiment, the Red Scare, and rise of the KKK. Warren G. Harding wins the Presidency on a slogan to return to “normalcy.” This is a foreground to the excesses and paradox of the Roaring Twenties. Whether religious or secular, people yearn for hope, a vision of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They long for an artist-hero like Kent to emerge from his wilderness cave after a dark night of the soul, and like Jason and his Argonauts, lavish upon them a golden fleece. The public demands a glimpse of the mountain behind the mountain – and that’s what Kent provided. His reading of the Odyssey as well as the Nordic and Celtic sagas; his reading Rockie the King Arthur legends while the boy plays the hero's role for days on end; Kent's identification with Nietzsche’s hero, Zarathustra; his romantic attachment to ancient Greek culture; and his fascination with Indian mysticism while reading Ananda Coomaraswamy's essays – all this certainly prepares him to play the role of the artist-hero suffering through and surviving a treacherous adventure and returning safely, though scarred, with his gift to humanity. Old Olson is his mentor – his Obi-Wan-Kenobi, his Yoda.  Like Theseus, Kent enters the perilous maze to face his personal Minotaur. His thread – Rockie, who connects him to his wife and family. Rockie gives him the motivation to persevere. Kent can’t give up or seriously entertain thoughts of suicide, leaving his son stranded in a strange land. He must not only return home safely, but he must also bring back the prize. It’s a story out of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and The Power of Myth (1988).

ABOVE –Obi, Yoda & Oli  

By Feb. 11, 1920, Kent plans to have at least fifteen large canvases and twenty small ones for his exhibition scheduled from March 1-13 . But most are unfinished – in fact, he has only one completed as of Feb. 11th. He is delighted, though, with his gallery space.  I’m to have the two smaller galleries on the ground floor at Knoedlers, he writes to Carl Russell.  That’s just as good as the big one. He’s also pleased with his catalogue cover. The quote from Dostoevsky he incorporates into the design, emphasizes his mystical connection to the mountain behind the mountain.

ABOVE – An ad for Kent’s exhibition from the Feb. 29, 1920 issue of the New York Herald.

On Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1920 he writes to Ruggles: On Saturday {Feb. 21} we all migrate to New York. It’s a thrilling occasion for me. Not only is my exhibition to be open during my stay there but my book – my first book!...The pictures are nearly all done. Twice indeed. All but two of them are quite conventional landscapes or marines; but these have, I believe, a freshness and veracity that give them distinction and show me, moreover, to be still young. Kent wants to make sure he and Ruggles get together while he’s in New York. He doesn’t know where he’ll be staying in the city, but first plans to stop at his mother’s house in Tarrytown. He asks Ruggles to send his phone number in care of Knoedler’s Gallery.

As if to throw another challenge at Kent, the heaviest storm that winter arrives in Vermont just as he, his family and the paintings have to get to New York. The road was so deeply drifted as to be impassable even on horseback, he wrote in his autobiography. So I constructed a kind of sled on ski-like runners; and, loading the big box on to it, Rockwell and I set off on snow-shoes to draw it through the woods to a railroad way station that was but two miles distant from our farm. It was a long, hard pull, but get it there we did. But when they got to the station…

“Sorry,” said he agent, as we dumped it on the station platform, “we can’t take it. On account of the storm there’s an embargo on all express to New York.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll buy a ticket to New York and check it.”

“Sorry,” said the agent, “can’t be done. That box isn’t baggage.”

Kent argued, but the agent took out a book of regulations to prove his point. The box wasn’t too large to be considered baggage, but it didn’t have handles. So Kent and Rockie left it at the station and trudged back home. I can see Kent, rather than expressing anger and frustration, almost laughing. This trip was nothing compared with those winter ventures across Resurrection Bay from Fox Island to Seward and back in the 18-foot dory with the broken down Evinrude engine. He survived Alaska’s fierce north wind, Resurrection Bay’s treacherous seas, loneliness, darkness, extreme isolation, and obtuse nosy busybodies. This trek in a Vermont snow storm is a luxury for the two adventurers. If anyone thought a snowstorm and a petty rulebook will stop Rockwell Kent at this point, they don't know the man.  It was but a few hours work, Kent writes, to make a handled, metal-cornered, trunk-like container, paint it with quick drying paint and, as a last touch of elegance, letter my initials on it. And the next day, having sledged it to the station, re-packed my paintings in it, and checked it, I boarded the train for New York…The New York streets were narrow alleys between banks of snow. Traffic was virtually at a standstill; but the difficulties of transportation seemingly inclining the police to leniency toward traffic violators, I was driven unmolested – the taxi door half open to allow for the big “trunk” – to Knoedler’s. Max Kuehne, a painter friend, makes the frames for Kent’s paintings.. Once prepared, Kent helps hang the exhibit on Sunday, Feb. 29 (1920 is a Leap Year) the night before the opening.

Rockwell Kent's show of the Alaska paintings opens on March 1, 1920. Over thirty years later in his autobiography, It's Me O Lord, Kent writes: And the people liked the mountains.

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PART 4

WILDERNESS AND THE ALASKA PAINTINGS

THE REVIEWS