AUG. 6 - 9, 2019 PART 4: WILDERNESS & THE ALASKA PAINTINGS -- THE REVIEWS

 ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 4 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: The Reviews

Aug. 6–9, 2019

ABOVE – Pioneers (or, Into the Sun), 1919. Oil on canvas, 28 x 44 ¼ in.

I have just finished the life of Blake and am now reading Blake’s prose catalogue, etc., and a book of Indian essays of Coomaraswamy. The intense and illuminating fervor of Blake! I have just read this: “The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that Art can go beyond the finest specimens of Art that are now in the world is not knowing what art is; it is being blind to the gifs of the Spirit.” Here in the supreme simplicity of life amid these mountains the spirit laughs at man’s concern with the form of Art, with new expression because the old is outworn! It is man’s own poverty of vision yielding him nothing, so that to save himself he must trick out in new garb the old, old commonplaces, or exalt to be material for art the hitherto discarded trivialities of the mind.

         Rockwell Kent in Wilderness, Tuesday, Nov. 19, 1918

An early and important review of Rockwell Kent’s Knoedler exhibition of his Alaska paintings appears in the Sunday, March 7, 1920 New York Herald. Henry McBride

writes:

The moment the doors were opened {Monday, March 1} the gallery was filled with the same old crowd of whispering, awestruck sensation mongers that one saw there last year, when Mr. Kent first came back from the frozen north with a bunch of Blakelike drawings under his arm. That May 1919 exhibition of Kent’s pen and inks was successful and had, indeed, created anticipation. What would be next? Would the paintings exceed expectations? Now it is a question of the oil paintings, McBride writes, and the dynamics are greater and the exclamations are greater. The frozen north is more austere even than we had imagined…

ABOVE – Alaska Winter, 1918-1919. BELOW – A winter scene from Fox Island of the possible perspective Kent used for Alaska Winter. Capra photo.

It’s no wonder the gallery was full. People were curious about Kent – but he also tapped into the public’s curiosity about the frozen north. Alaska has been in the news for many years, and most people knew little about frontier realities. Many East Coast businessmen had investments in Alaska. Myths about Alaska flourished back then. They still do today. William Dall, a naturalist working in Alaska before the purchase had been publicizing the possession’s value for decades. John Muir visited Wrangle, Glacier Bay, and Tracy Arm in 1879 and wrote many articles about the northland. Steamship companies began taking tourists up the Inside Passage by the early 1880’s. The 1898 Klondike Goldrush brought extensive notice and stampeders to the area. (Gold was discovered there in 1896. All the important ground was staked in a month. Word of the strike didn’t get out until 1897. The rush occurred in 1898.) Other strikes followed in Hope and Sunrise on the Kenai Peninsula, in Nome, the Tanana Valley and Iditarod country. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt created the two largest national forest units in the country – the Tongass (16.7 million acres) and the Chugach (almost 7 million acres). By the time Kent came to Alaska, the U.S. clearly recognized the resource prize William H. Seward purchased from Russia in 1867. Alaska had become a territory in 1912 and given women the vote in 1913. The territory began pushing statehood bills in Congress by 1916. Now, as Kent showed his paintings, the news was about much-needed coal and opening Alaska’s interior to agriculture and other resources with the construction of a new railroad from tidewater at Seward to Fairbanks. It was not only financed by the federal, but they would also operate it. Never before had the U.S. government run a railroad.

BELOW – Seward, Alaska circa 1915 – the terminus of the new Government Railroad. Once completed in 1923 it became known as the Alaska Railroad. Resurrection Bay Historical Society.

McBride’s review continues -- Some of the plump and sentimental ladies among those present were sure that poor Mr. Kent must have suffered. M-m-m. Perhaps he did. Why, even the waterfalls froze solid. Certainly Mr. Kent suffered. Though possibly the paintings of them were worked up down here from sketches.

ABOVE – Frozen Falls, Alaska 1919. On Friday, Feb. 14, 1919, Kent writes in Wilderness: This afternoon I painted at the northern end of the beach almost beneath a frozen waterfall, an emerald of huge size and wonderful form. The waterfall BELOW is probably the one in the painting. It fits Kent's description precisely. In other letters, he describes painting on the beach beside it. With all the rain they had that year, it would have been quite a large frozen falls. Notice the two caves to the right and left of the larger of the falls. The perspective of the painting above looks like the view is from the entrance to the lefthand cave looking toward Bear Glacier to the south in the distance. If that's the case, Kent stood near the lefthand cave entrance or perhaps just inside the cave. If Kent used this waterfall, he was most likely looking northwest and moved Bear Glacier into the composition. From that spot, the south perspective would have blocked any view of the glacier. Capra photo.

 McBride seems to acknowledge Kent’s suffering in Alaska. Yet, not having read the personal letters between the artist and his wife, he’s most likely referring to physical challenges with wilderness survival. In a May 11, 1919 review of the pen and inks in the New York Herald, McBride writes of Kent’s reading of Nietzsche and Blake. He has turned over other despairing pages and has gone out alone at night to interrogate the heavens. But for all that, 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 in spite of his own words, it has been distinctly larkish. In It’s Me O Lord, Rockwell Kent looked back from the mid-1950’s to his Alaska show and wrote of McBride’s review, noting the critic observed that some among the crowd felt that the painter must have suffered in the sub-Arctic cold – though guessing (oh these critics!). Perhaps those plump and perceptive ladies who saw suffering in the Kent paintings are more discerning than some of the critics. Either that, or they carried over those conceptions from the year before when they had viewed Kent’s Alaska pen and inks.

Those readers following this website who have read the excerpts I’ve published from Kent’s and Kathleen letters to and from Alaska, know how he did suffer. Granted, he brings much of the anguish upon himself. But misery is misery whether self-inflected or not – perhaps worse if it’s your own fault. We see Kent’s suffering mostly in the drawings.  Most were probably conceived and/or completed in the Fox Island cabin’s darkness, late at night and in the early morning hours during the Hour of the Wolf. He doesn’t have enough light – between the weather and the diminishing sunlight – to work on the paintings. The letters to Kathleen written during these same dark hours demonstrate his pain and it seems that finds its way into the drawings. 

Out of curiosity, I went back to my transcribed files of Kent's and Kathleen's letters from Alaska. I did a search for  variations of "suffer," "suffered" and "suffering." I gave up counting after a few dozen finds. It's clear that both went through a difficult time.

ABOVE and BELOW – Pen and Inks from Wilderness.

Shortly after his return home and move to Vermont, we see the memory of that misery and the energy it produced evolve. On June 22, 1919, Kent writes to Carl Zigrosser: I really think that every time and forever that I stand on these hilltops {at “Egypt” in Vermont} I’ll love life again as if it were all glorious. We see Kent beginning to heal. On Sept. 2, 1919, Kent writes to Olson: I can’t think of Fox Island without being a bit homesick. He’s only a bit homesick by the fall of 1919. By this time he’s focused on his family, rebuilding his new home, and producing his book. He’s had time to reflect on the success of his drawings and now he’s more focused on the possibilities. He realizes the book’s publication and the painting exhibition in early 1920 will be his moment for either success or failure. He’ll soon be 40 years old. Always vigorous, he doubles down with the vigor of a marathon racer to finish the book and the paintings. He uses that stored negative dynamism to portray the idealism and romanticism of the quiet adventure and inspiration he found on Fox Island. Forget the letters to Kathleen. That’s over, that’s past, only part of the process. The wilderness tried to defeat him, and at first he thought it had succeeded. But not anymore. He has more than just survived. He has prevailed. He not only made it from the island to Seward and back through treacherous seas, he also provided a safe haven and memorable experience for his son. He made it home, and he hasn’t lost Kathleen or his children. He uses his illustrated letter-journals as the basis for his narrative.

BELOW – Rockwell's and Kathleen’s children in Vermont, circa 1921. From left to right, Barbara, Clara, Rockie (Rockwell III) holding Gordon, Kathleen. Kent family album, private collection.

NEXT ENTRY

PART 5

WILDERNESS AND THE ALASKA PAINTINGS

THE REVIEWS