AUG. 17 - 20, 2019 PART 7: WILDERNESS & THE ALASKA PAINTINGS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 7 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: The Reviews

Aug. 17-20, 2019

ABOVE – Bear Glacier, Alaska, 1919

BELOW – North Wind, Alaska, 1919

Once back in New York after Alaska, the foreshadow of success came rather quickly to Rockwell Kent. His pen and ink exhibition in May 1919 sold well and reviews matched the sales. Kent exhibited the paintings in March 1920. Critic Henry McBride did see what he called some difficulties with the paintings unrecognized, he believed, by most admirers. 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. Kent straddled the line between realism and symbolism. North Wind seemed to garner much attention, and Kent regarded it along with Superman as his best work.

ABOVE – Frozen Falls, Alaska 1919

BELOW – To the Universe, Alaska 1918-19

 Despite the fact that in North Wind a nice, warm, pink, naked youth scuttles through the atmosphere of an apparently chilly country, McBride wrote, Mr. Kent is still a realist. I think he has a brain that stores up facts and that detaches itself from facts with the greatest difficulty. Mr. Kent interprets but he interprets realistically. The far north is gaunt and bare. The artist is more emphatic upon that point than any other traveler who got as far north as Resurrection Bay… The issue wasn’t so much Kent’s simplification, his focus on the elemental, McBride claimed, as it was the true effects of light that he dispenses and his genuine instincts for form and color. While others were awed by North Wind, McBride considered the artist’s best work the rather literal “Bear Glacier,” a picture of snow and ice and dark water and solid foregrounds; work that he has done before, though never so well. This pull between mysticism and realism represented the difficulties McBride saw in Kent’s paintings. What makes great art and literature? Some have said its ambivalence, among other things.

ABOVE – Photograph of Bear Glacier by John E. Thwaites, circa 1923. Kent met Thwaites the day he arrived in Seward – Aug. 24, 1918. A former mail clerk aboard the steamship Dora, Thwaites had traveled much of Alaska’s coast photographing scenics and selling them as postcards. When Kent was on Fox Island, Thwaites was in business with local photographer, Sylvia Sexton. Kent sent a Bear Glacier postcards to Carl Zigrosser on Aug. 30, 1918 with This glacier is only a short distance from my island. I’ll send you a copy of the chart of this bay so you may envy me the more and think of us often.

BELOW – Resurrection Bay, Alaska, c. 1939, Frye Museum of Art, Seattle. It’s clear Kent based this painting on the photo above. Kent scholar Jake Milgram Wien goes into the history of this painting in “Origin Stories: Rockwell Kent Painting in Focus” (Rockwell Kent Review, Spring 2014). It's known history begins in 1966 when Ernest Henry Gruening (1887-1974), in his second term as U.S. Senator from Alaska wrote Kent about acquiring one of his Alaska paintings, Wien writes. Kent sent Gruening a color photo of a painting in his studio, Gruening approved, and the artist worked on it. Wien notes that the painting is mounted on boards which suggests it is one of the original paintings Kent commenced on Fox Island in 1918-19, removed from its stretcher, rolled up for shipment, and mounted on board in his studio at some later date. Kent had wanted to go camping during April or May 1919 at Bear Glacier with Rockie to do some painting, and later explore the coast. That never happened due to Kent’s early return to New York. Wien notes that Bear Glacier symbolized primordial nature and northern extremity to Kent, and that this painting represents a virtual expedition to the site of his unrequited dreams. Until more analysis can be done on the painting, Wien suggests it might be best to date the painting, “n.d.”

 Rockwell Kent is also fighting some other philosophical contradictions as were many intellectuals, artists and writers as modernism emerged. What about Plato’s Cave? Is reality outside the cave or inside the cave – or neither. Maybe it’s all inside our individual heads. In Shakespeare – after seeing the ghost of his father, Hamlet tells his friend, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If there is more, as Hamlet contends, then there is a mountain behind the mountain. There is an invisible word of forms and essences. William Blake’s visions just might be real. Kent had read Emerson and Thoreau, and we can see the influences. This is the more traditional or romantic view. If there is less – we can become cynical or even nihilistic -- reductionists or materialists. Is all truth relative or subjective? Post-modernism suggested this world view. Maybe it’s not more or less but the same, or as Georg WilhelmFriedrich Hegel says…that which is real is rational and that which is rational is real. What you see is what you get. This is rationalism or modernism. One can label a painter a realist but then – what is reality? For Plato, spirit is most real (or mind). Matter is merely a shadow. For materialists it’s the reverse: if there are shadows it’s because we’ve created them. They are human constructs. Matter is all that is. But for Plato there are more things than just things – there are essences. Or might we call them elementals? The mission of philosophy, according to Plato, is to unchain us so we can see beyond the shadows on the cave walls, free our tethered necks so we can see view the absolutes outside. For much of his life, Kent carried with him Leo Tolstoy’s book, What is Art? He framed his philosophy of art around that book. In a Nov. 11, 1964 letter to Nebraska artist Dale Nichols, Kent wrote that...the only book on art, I might add -- that has been of great importance to me is Tolstoy's "What is Art?" Learning of it at first through the ridicule of my fellow students at the Chase school and Henri school, I found it be nothing but a thorough illuminating revelation of the truth -- and that truth to be so fundamental -- and akin to my own nature that it has been with me ever since. Art to me is but a means toward an end, that end being the communication to others of a greater understanding and love of life. If an unbeliever may quote scripture, I attribute the Second Commandment of the Ten Commandments, that forbidding the worship of graven images, to art, reading it as against the warning of loving art, the love of any of the arts, or being but a plea to us to love life more.

In that same letter to Nichols, Kent writes of his connection to William Blake: I am often amused, or annoyed, by critics attributing of influences in the work of artists. I recall that year ago an astute critic my work to have been strongly influenced by a certain German artist, with whose work, and even whose name, I was completely unfamiliar...When I went to Alaska in 1918 I knew practically nothing of William Blake, having only in my possession a little, sparsely illustrated volume of his life. But I quickly recognized him as a kindred spirit and subsequently, throughout the years, have come to have quite an important collection of works on Blake and by him. (More on Dale Nichols and his connection to Kent in the next entry.)

ABOVE – Pioneers in the Sun, Alaska 1918-19

BELOW – Alaska Winter, 1918-19

So – does one adopt the mystic point of view (There is more.); a reductionist or post-modern vision (There is less); or rationalism (What you see is what’s out there.). (See Peter Kreeft’s Doors in theWalls of the World: Signs of Transcendence in the Human Story, 2018). Kent is reading Nietzsche and Blake while on Fox Island. Granted, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a significant influence upon Nietzsche but – where does the connection end or even begin? It can get confusing. Kent was a thinker who read and contemplated much and tried to synthesize it all. Kent is trying to work all this out, especially during his Newfoundland and Alaska excursions.

ABOVE – Snowy Peaks, Alaska

BELOW – Sunny Cove, the probably view used for this painting. This is the cove just south of Kent's cove on Fox Island. Kent could get a better view of Bear Glacier from the far south end of Sunny Cove.

Jake Milgram Wien gives more nuance to this discussion of Kent's spirituality in Vital Passage: The Newfoundland Epic of Rockwell Kent (2014). (See also Wien’s Rockwell Kent: They Mythic and the Modern, 2005; and Rockwell Kent’s “Egypt”: Shadow& Light in Vermont, 2012)). Referring to the series of paintings Kent displayed at the Daniel Gallery after his Newfoundland trip (the Newfoundland Epic), Wien notes that Kent alerted Daniel about the distinct spiritual message contained in the series. It was a transgressive message, Wien writes, conceived by a doubting mind wrestling with doctrinaire religion and responsive to new and radical currents of thought. Scott Ferris considers Kent a pantheist – a doctrine which identifies God with the universe rather than a distinct creator of it – the universe as a manifestation of God. Perhaps for Kent, pantheism may have been a middle ground as he straddles the unstable terrain between religious doctrine and Nietzsche’s abyss. In his foreword to the 1996 Wesleyan Univ. Press/UP New England edition of Kent's N by E, Edward Hoagland wrote that Jacoblike, Kent wrestled for his life with nature's angels on occasion (usually on the ocean), as if to validate his vocation after hobnobbing with the hucksters of the big city for a season, or after a smashup in his hectic love life. He probably never saw those visions as did Blake, but part of of him may have always wondered wether they were out there.

We cannot easily dismiss Kent's early religious epiphany as a young Episcopalian -- and his later prudery regarding sex and morality. In his diary, Kent’s friend and painter John Sloan wrote that their teacher, Robert Henri, pulled their religious tooth. Perhaps. Or, Kent’s struggle with religious doctrine festered like an impacted wisdom tooth. God, Soul and Spirit – are words he often uses in his Alaska letters and in Wilderness. At one point, in utter despair on Fox Island, Kent does get down on his knees and prays. This kind of ambivalent-tension gives art and life energy.

ABOVE – House of Dread, 1914-15

BELOW – Newfoundland Home, 1915

Kent’s spiritual struggle certainly doesn’t begin in Alaska, as scholar Scott Ferris recently noted in an email to me (Aug. 16, 2019): I believe Kent's struggle with Life and ultimately, his creative self-expression–versus his more commercial endeavors–was born of his childhood rearing... having lived life on both sides of the track. Fast forward to 1906, –where we first find his deep thoughts written on paper–and he basically does layout the path he will take in Life. So in that sense, I do not find Alaska to be the seed for Kent's duality, but yet another chapter in his ongoing struggle (one that the public will finally come to recognize and appreciate). As I’ve suggested, however, I do think the severe isolation Kent experienced on Fox Island combined with many other events in his life -- his affair with Hildegarde, his failing marriage, his mid-life crisis, the recent rejection of his Newfoundland art, the war, the influenza epidemic, his recent reading, and his close relationship with Olson and Rockie – all this pushed Kent deep into his work. And we can’t forget the character of the landscape within which he embedded himself – Alaska. His quiet and unquiet adventure didn’t happen within a vacuum. Kent absorbed the presence of the Alaska wilderness all around him with not only his five senses – but a sixth sense – the imagination. All this input combined with the struggles of his inner spirit, and ended up on canvas and paper and in Wilderness.

Scott Ferris also gives much more nuance to this discussion of Kent's spirituality in several articles and reviews on his Rockwell Kent website.

ABOVE – Newfoundland Dirge, 1914-17

BELOW – Superman, Alaska, 1919. This painting, exhibited at Kent's 1920 Alaska exhibition, has disappeared. We don't know whether it was destroyed, painted over, or remains in private hands.

Critic Henry McBride sees other problems for Kent. Not with the art itself – but with the crowded galleries. In his review of the Alaska pen and inks on May 11, 1919, McBride in the New York Herald warns Kent and other artists about becoming too enthusiastic about positive reviews and excellent sales. The success not only excited Kent but also encouraged other artists to view the exhibit. Artists have a way…of drinking hope from the evidence of sales, McBride writes, even the sales of others; but they must be warned again that such thoughts are evil, and must be put firmly aside. McBride recognizes that something psychological has taken place within the public mind. The indifferent public had melted and was buying Kent’s drawings as precipitantly as though they had been {Leon} Baksts. Yes, something psychological has taken place – the political, social and cultural context has changed after World War I and the influenza epidemic and the violent and toxic turmoil of the year 1919. People yearn for the normal, the ordinary, the elemental. Modernism becomes more visible. James Joyce’s Ulysses is published in 1922.

Rockwell Kent, in fact, was now to undergo the severest test of all – public success, McBride writes in the 1919 review. It seems a time for his friends to stick closer to him than ever. McBride continues his warning a year later in his March 7, 1920 review in the New York Herald: If by any chance these lines should catch the eye of Rockwell Kent, that gentleman is begged to desist to read no further, for this little notice is to concern itself with Mr. Kent’s own paintings now being shown in Knoedler’s and it may degenerate into something laudatory. In fact if Mr. Kent be wise, he will read none of the notions that appear in any of the newspapers, for all of them will be laudatory, and too much laudation, like too much taffy, is bad for the young. The young – and I call’em young up to 35 – should read only the bad notices. Bad notices are apt to have ideas in them, and besides are better discipline. Some artist pretend that they never read notices of any kind…and possibly young Mr. Kent actually practices what these artists preach. In that case, he is safe for the present. After admitting that, well – Goethe’s poetry and art didn’t suffer from all the admiration he got – McBride adds in parenthesis, Gee! Go away, Rockwell, you really mustn’t read this. Since Kent seems to be influenced by German romantics like Goethe, McBride writes, he may as well have all the sugar plums he wishes now…He appears to be going to get them anyway, judging by what I saw on Monday.

And, indeed, Kent did get those sugar plums. On the same day McBride’s review came out in the New York Herald (March 7, 1920)—Hamilton Easter Field from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle visited Knoedler’s. He first wandered into the right-hand gallery where a month before he recalled seeing hanging there a wonderful Manet. Now hung there was a monstrosity – a decoration which will never decorate – a picture of the life of the Indians in the Far West which has all the trumpery of a Parisian art student’s first attempt at historical compositions. In short, it is a painting which has none of the qualities which alone can justify the use of so large a canvas and so much good paint. Julius Rolshoven {another Rolshoven link} has the skill to paint a head fairly well. He has neither the skill nor the taste to succeed in a canvas as ambitious as that now shown at Knoedler’s. It was a more pleasant experience when Field escaped into an adjoining gallery to see fifteen Rockwell Kent paintings and two dozen sketches. This week has been marked by the opening of an unusually large number of exhibitions, some of which are quite important. The one which has impressed me the most is that of the Alaska paintings by Rockwell Kent…Rockwell Kent is at his best in his more ambitious canvases. What constitutes the peculiar charm of Kent’s work? Why does it move us as much as nature does in her most impressive moods? That is what I do not know. I can but suggest reasons. The north wind bites and cuts, the mountains covered with snow seem as sharp as razor blades. The feeling which the north wind gives, how can it be painted? Rockwell Kent’s “Northwind” symbolic as it is, gives you the impression which the bitter wind made upon him. Here, then, is an artist who is capable of give us in terms of beauty the thrills which he felt during an Alaskan winter. He records his experience in paint much as {HenryDavid} Thoreau records his in words. There are many points in common between Kent and Thoreau. Both have a strong instinctive love for what is elemental in nature. Both have the dread of the conventionality of the social life of civilization. They are different in that the prose of Thoreau is usually direct, whereas the art of Kent is suggestive, symbolic. It would seem as if he had learned from music the value of rhythm as a stimulus to suggestion and from architecture the value of structural unity. There is much in common between Kent and Winslow Homer. Kent is lyric and epic; Homer was epic with hardly a trace of the lyric in his nature. Rockwell Kent’s art is too great to need any foil. It would be untrue, however, to deny that the frames of Max Kuehue serve their purpose admirably and are very beautiful in themselves.

BELOW – Hamilton Easter Field review of Rockwell Kent’s Alaska paintings  in the April 11, 1920 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Kent always had a love of music. His wife Kathleen was a talented musician. Did Kent’s friendship with composer Carl Ruggles play a role in his experimentation, his move from realism toward symbolism? On May 2, 1920 -- after disregarding McBride’s advice and reading all the positive reviews for both the paintings and his book – Kent scribbled on a postcard to Ruggles: At last someone agrees with me about that fellow R.K.! Say! What a lot of spiritless boobs the critics are that hand you a little bit of milk or ___  posies and think we should fall on our knees and thank them. God – if I didn’t think almighty much of myself I’d have pride enough to have stopped painting long ago – and so would you have stopped your music.

Wandering through Knoedler’s Gallery that spring of 1920 was a 32-year-old writer and editor from Quincy, Massachusetts with a B.A. and M.A. from Harvard University. Henry Edouard Sheahan was enthralled. The paintings reminded him of life’s elementals, his love of nature, the sea and his appreciation for William Blake. He had taught for a time at the University of Lyons. When World War I began he returned to teach at Harvard. The next year Sheahan joined the French Army as an ambulance driver and experienced the Battle of Verdun. In 1920, the same year he visited Kent’s Alaska paintings, Sheahan met the woman he would marry nine years later – Elizabeth Jane Coasworth. On Feb. 16, 1921 he wrote to Elizabeth: So you have been reading Rockwell Kent. It’s most likely he had already read Wilderness, even suggested it to Elizabeth. In the letter, Sheahan describes his experience at Knoedler’s. He would soon build himself a comfortable shack on a Cape Cod dunes, name it the Fo’castle, and record his solitude there during the various seasons. In 1928, the year before his marriage to Elizabeth, Sheahan would publish, as Henry Beston, a classic in natural history – The Outermost House: A Year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. One can’t write a book like that without some reference to Henry David Thoreau, and Beston was certainly influenced by the Concord philosopher. But I believe there are also echoes of Rockwell Kent, Wilderness, and the images of the Alaska paintings that so awed Beston in 1920 -- and he was far from the only writer and artist who were inspired and influenced by Wilderness and the Alaska paintings.

BELOW – Henry Sheahan in 1917, the year before Rockwell Kent travels to Alaska. In this photo he’s a 29-year-old war correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly with Allied Fleet “Grand Armanda” based at Scapa Flow in Scotland. Photo from Orion on the Dunes: A Biography of Henry Beston by Daniel G. Payne ((2016).

NEXT ENTRY

PART 8

WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA

THE REVIEWS