AUG. 9 - 12, 2019 PART 5 WILDERNSS & THE ALASKA PAINTINGS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 5 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: The Reviews

Aug. 9-, 2019

ABOVE -- North Wind, 1918

What annoyed Kent in the McBride review, the artist notes in his 1955 autobiography, is the comment that “the paintings were worked up down here {in Vermont} from sketches” We know they weren’t, Kent adds in parenthesis. In Wilderness on Wed. Dec. 9, 1918 – after recording one of Olson’s stories – Kent writes: I would not have devoted all of the time I have to this day’s entry if I had not a good day’s work to my credit including the conception of a new picture so vivid that the doing of it will be mere copying. It is the “North Wind.” Surely after the past four days I may tell with authority of that wild Prince from the North. By Dec. 13 the painting is done and Kent writes: I made of my “North Wind” the most beautiful picture that ever was. I stood it facing outwards in the doorway and from far off it still showed as vivid, more vivid, and brilliant than nature itself. It is the first time I’ve taken my pictures into the broad light. There’s where they should be seen.

 In the autobiography, Kent also writes about realism terms of art and life. To those who, like McBride, approached being correspondents in the divorce of art from life which was in progress, the eager acceptance of the paintings by the vast majority of gallery visitors as not only of a way of life, was a phenomenon of which a good reporter might take notice without, however, conceding that it had anything to do with art, and even count it as a strike – perhaps a third – against it. Kent’s teacher, Robert Henry, had taught his students that the meaningful and significant art emerged from a full and deliberate life. Great artists don’t hold up in their studios waiting for inspiration. They get out into the world and live totally. Art is life and life was art. A dynamic life produces energetic art. The public identifies and connects with reality, authenticity, truth. In his autobiography, Kent continues his reflections:

Realism, in the unreal post-war world was hard beset to hold its feet amid the disintegration of cultural standards which paralleled the general abandonment of long-established principles of life and government. Looking back to 1920 from the early 1950’s, with Joseph McCarthy and a new Red Scare in process, Kent wrote: Just as today, political descent was held a crime; and in the resultant persecution, deportation, murder of dissenters, due process of the law became a mockery. Suppression in the name of Liberty! Yet in the period’s exaltation of the individual and, in the arts of “self expression,” the truth about our world (again today!) was frowned upon or utterly contemned. “Express yourself,” demanded those who spoke for culture’s regimenting forces, “don’t look around. Not only see, hear, speak no evil of the world you live in, speak no good—lest people might be led to claim a greater share of it.” And as though sent by God to guide fields of art, only too eager to adapt themselves to fashion yet, bereft of standards, utterly confused by art’s new Freudian face, fell easy victim not only to the whole misbegotten movement but, within that movement, to every parody upon it that jokesters might contrive. Yet at the time of my Alaskan show…the new movement in painting that was to all but take over our galleries before the end of the decade, had but stuck its foot at the doors. People still thronged to look at realistic art, critics still, though hesitatingly, could bring themselves to write in praise of it; and I may believe that those who saw my paintings read in them something of the glory of the North and of the happiness that we had found there.

BELOW – The Sunday, March 7, 1920 New York Herald with Henry McBride’s review of Kent’s Alaska paintings.

In reading these comments, one must realize that Rockwell Kent is writing from the early 1950’s (It’s Me O Lord was published in 1955). In many ways he is not the same man who had struggled, and prevailed – angry and alienated though he was – on Fox Island. He is not the same man who wrote on Feb. 17, 1919 to artist Gus Mager, I’m glad the war’s over. I’ve become a confirmed anarchist. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t think I owe anybody anything – who has never done anything for me.”  Nor is he the same man who – just two months before his pen and ink show and a year before his Alaska painting exhibition – wrote to Carl Zigrosser (March 6, 1919), Why could not a man deliberately isolate himself from his own time if its ideals are annoyingly antagonistic to his own; exclude all news and gossip, fence his domain against intrusion, make of its portal the entranceway from this day in America, without to eternity and the Cosmos…

Kent would often claim in later years that his philosophy of life and art remained the same all his life. I question that. We all change, and it often happens so gradually – with a fair degree of rationalization – that we’re not always aware of it. If Kent had reread his toxic and painful letters to Kathleen from Alaska, he would have faced a different version of himself. I doubt he ever reread them. This is not to say that some of his core believes didn’t remain the same. But much of the art he produced in Newfoundland and Alaska during his experimentation period is not what he painted later in life. For an excellent book that explores this, read Jake Milgram Wien’s Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern (2005). For a fine book about Kent’s later work, see Scott R. Ferris’s The View from Asgaard: Rockwell Kent’s Adirondack Legacy (2000).

The McBride review continues: Certainly, there is nobody else in this country but Kent who “steps from island to island” like {Gabriele} D’Annunzio or who shoots long, slim arrows at the noonday sun. McBride’s review and others like it, solidify Kent’s reputation as the adventurer-artist in the tradition of George Catlin and John James Audubon. Wilderness and the art may also connect him to the more wilderness-venturing, risk-taking naturalists like John Muir, whose Travels in Alaska was published in 1915 while Kent was in Newfoundland. (As I read Wilderness, I occasionally hear Muir’s voice. I suspect Kent read Muir’s Alaska book). Kent embraces the recognition he gets as an adventurer and capitalizes on it. It’s who he is, and that acknowledgment perhaps encourages him to further develop that identity.

ABOVE – Sunglare, Alaska 1919

Kent had been reading a book about George Anson’s voyage around the world while on Fox Island. On Oct. 5, 1918 in Wilderness he writes: In the account of Anson’s voyage around the Horn it is remarked that fair weather in those latitudes rarely last. It may be true that the same latitudes north.  After Alaska, Kent’s next adventure would be to Tierra el Fuego with an attempt to round the Horn. He would recount that journey in his second book, Voyaging Southward from the Strait ofMagellan (1924) On March 6, 1918 while on Fox Island he writes to Kathleen: I’m reading a wonderful history of northern exploration by Nansen {FridtjofNansen’s In Northern Mists} A great man makes of the least thing he finishes a glorious work. Nansen thrills me with his wonderful spirit – the artist – Nansen is a true artist for the book, besides the fine literary charm it possesses, is illustrated by him with beautiful imaginative drawings – the historian, the scientist and the explorer in one.- and the philosopher and man of vision. Curiously confirming what I wrote you yesterday about our own estate of no place nor time I find – looking ahead to the last line of Nansen’s book, these words “The world of the spirit knows neither space nor time.” It’s clear from the examples below that the design of Nansen’s In Northern Mists influenced the design of Wilderness.

ABOVE – Art from Nansen’s In Northern Mists.

BELOW – Art from Kent’s Wilderness

Kent has challenged the seas off the cost of Monhegan Island, Maine. He has ventured twice to Newfoundland. And now Alaska – his most authentic confrontation with real wildness, certainly the most dangerous and harsh conditions he has experienced so far. He probably dreams of future success as the heroic artist adventurer. McBride continues his review, claiming that Kent’s new success shows you what a response there is to heroism. Now, more than any other artist that we have, Mr. Kent brings out his fellow painters from their dens. An exhibition by Rockwell Kent? Sure, lets’ go see it. Even Edward Kramer of Bronxville, himself a poet and just over the ordeal of an exhibition, was there. He said he had not known Kent s work until he saw the little drawings in the recent painter-sculptor-graver show…. It was distinctly worth the trip from Bronxville to Knoedler’s to see the sort of pictures that would be painted by the sort of man who made those drawings.

BELOW – An article about Edward Adam Kramer in the Jan. 8, 1920 issue of New York Daily News.

McBride did see what he called some difficulties with the paintings, unrecognized by the plump and perceptive ladies. There is a tension in the art -- …two very different spirits that are still struggling for the possession of Mr. Kent’s soul,” the critic wrote. It is likely this artistic tension that made the exhibit so interesting and provocative.

NEXT ENTRY

PART 6

WILDERNESS AND THE ALASKA PAINTINGS

THE REVIEWS