OCT. 23 - 26 PART I: MORE THOUGHTS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part I – More Thoughts

Oct. 23-26, 2019

ABOVE – Rockwell Kent at about age five, the year his father died. Archives of American Art, Kent Collection.

BELOW – Top left to right – Rockwell as a child; Aunt Josie Banker; Rockwell’s father, George Rockwell Kent, with his silver flute. Bottom left to right – Rockwell, left, and brother Douglas with their mother, Sara Kent at Tarrytown, N.Y., June 1885; young Rockwell; Auntie Jo, Rockwell’s mother’s sister. Photos from Rockwell Kent: An Anthology of his Work edited, with an introduction by Fridolf Johnson (1982)

If you love a woman, marry her. If you like a painting, buy it…Do not read too much criticism on art. At the beginning it is apt to paralyze thought…Go directly to the work of art and face it alone. Do not remember anything anybody has said about it…

And when you look at a picture be sure you do not search too hard for that little name, or that big name, in the corner of the canvas. Some collectors are made in this very dull, joyous way. It may be good on the day of the auction, but to me it is like looking at happiness through another man’s eyes.

…Buy pictures, not names. The last thing to interest you in a work of art is the name of an artist. Pictures should be seen, not heard!

Juliana Force, quoted in Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1990) by Avis Berman, p. 7

BELOW -- A review of Rebels on Eight Street from the July 1, 1990 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the artistic/cultural atmosphere of late 19th, early 20th century America. Much of the information in this entry came from this book.

I am at the point in this draft where I need to stop and reflect. This website illustrates a process as much as a product. In a sense it combines a writer’s working journal along with the result. From here on I follow in summary Rockwell Kent’s life up to 1935 when he returns to Alaska briefly. After that I work to summarize his life and death. At this point, I’m considering how I will eventually work with the rewrite of this draft. There are many ways to tell the story of Kent and Alaska, various styles and genres. I’m experimenting with different methods.

I begin this entry with the quote above because I’m currently reading about the cultural milieu of this period. Avis Berman’s book, quoted above, is an excellent source with its focus on Juliana Force and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. (Avis visited Alaska with a friend last summer and came to Seward. I had a chance to meet with her while showing her some of the sites.). Juliana Force’s name shows up off and on in Kent’s Alaska letters. She led a fascinating life and play an essential role -- along with her employer and later her close friend, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney --  in promoting new American art within the stodgy cultural atmosphere of the times.

BELOW – Juliana Force. Wikipedia photo

In her book, Berman quotes journalist Allene Talmey who wrote an article about Force in the Feb. 1, 1940 issue of Vogue: Before the Whitney-Force tactics, the status of American painting and culture was deplorable. Most of the dealers, collectors, museums had little knowledge or desire to know about American artists, with the exception of a carefully culled few. Avis adds: It took the small band of trailblazers a good thirty years to prevail, for turn-of-the-century American was narrow, provincial, and smugly ignorant when it came to culture and creative expression. One must realize how difficult it was for artists and writers to blast through this stuffy and dense granite cultural wall. The image of the “artist” was not positive. It still reeked of Bohemian decadence in cities like Paris and later London. George du Maurier’s novel, Trilby, published in 1894, remained popular on stage and in film for many years, and the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 was still fresh in people’s minds.

Berman writes: In the main, the citizenry pigeonholed art and artists as useless, lazy, effeminate, decadent, European…Serious artists were converging on Manhattan by the hundreds, but they were apt to be ignored or scorned. Anyone whose work departed from the reigning requirements of sentimentality, picturesqueness, idealization, or laboriously recorded detail stood little chance of attracting sales. As John Sloan said of that grim period, ‘We always regarded contemporary success as artistic failure.’”

This was the era of Anthony Comstock’s attacks with his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1909, a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees, asked the organization’s president: What do you mean by American Art? Do you mean English or French or what? There is nothing American worth notice. The National Academy of Design held sway over any large art exhibits held in New York. Albert Stieglitz’s gallery group on lower Fifth Avenue represented a more radical vision. William MacBeth’s nearby gallery also dared show the new American art. By 1907, a new building opened in the heart of the city -- a woman-only private social organization called the Colony Club. Now working for Gertrude Whitney, Force organized an art show and featured some daring art for the time. A second show there happened in February 1908, only days after Robert Henri’s group, called the “Eight” by the press, began a frontal assault in 1908 on the National Academy of Design, with a show of their work.

ABOVE – The Colony Club opens, from the Feb. 16, 1907 issue of the New York Tribune.

BELOW – The Colony Club, one year later, from the Sept. 25, 1908 issue of the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York.)

Besides Henri, the group included William J. Glackens, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast and Arthur B. Davies.  

Over 300 viewers an hour viewed the exhibit at the MacBeth Gallery on Fifth Avenue. The exhibit featured the group of “Eight” but several of their students, including Rockwell Kent, also showed their work. Only seven paintings sold, and of those, four were purchased by Gertrude Whitney. As John Sloan write years later, At that time, to buy such unfashionable pictures was almost as revolutionary as painting them.”

A group of artists independent of the National Academy formed and held their  Independents Exhibit in 1910 followed by the famous Armory Show in 1913. The National Academy’s influence slowly began to diminish. Still, few galleries would exhibit American artists, the museums remained indifferent to American art, and few painters sold anything. John Sloan was 41 years old before he sold one of his works.

Rockwell Kent was not a member of Henri’s group. He was much younger than most of those artists. But he knew, befriended and studied under some of them. They were called the Ash Can School of Art or urban realists, yet another example of how the critics pigeonholed artists. They were much more varied in their work. Sometimes Rockwell Kent is grouped as a member of this Ash Can School, which is far from accurate. He shared much of Henri’s philosophy did some of the others, but Kent’s interest wasn’t in urban settings. Just as Edward Hopper often painted human isolation and alienation in the midst of the city, so Rockwell Kent sometimes depicted those themes in wilderness. Was there social commentary in some of Sloan and other urban realist painting? Of course. Could we argue that there may be latent social commentary in Kent’s wilderness paintings? The mere focus on that subject implies the social, psychological and spiritual value wildness provides at a time when the conservation movement was popular with the creation of national monuments, refuges and parks.

BELOW – From left, Everett Shinn, Robert Henri, John French Sloan. Circa 1896. Wikipedia photo.

     I continue to focus forward in Kent’s life rather than backwards. I must pretend, like the artist himself, that I have no idea what will become of him after Fox Island. David Traxel in his biography does a fine job describing Kent’s early life. I do think, though, that the death of Kent’s father when he was five years old, and his upbringing by women with no real male role models – played an important role in who he became. He never experienced a healthy relationship between a husband and wife. In his autobiography, he admits some revealing attitudes he had toward women while at the Horace Mann School.

    We must also consider two things about Kent’s mother. First, she was raised in wealth and privilege by her Uncle James Banker and his wife. The elitist snobbery of the nouveau riche during the Gilded Age with their struggle to get placed on the social register, has been well documented. Avis Berman covers it, especially in her description of the confrontation between the Astor’s and the Vanderbilts. Although the Bankers were not as high up on the social ladder as were the Vanderbilts, I’m reminded how Gertrude Vanderbilt was raised, the struggle shown in her adolescent journals, her rebellion, and yet how much of her elitist upbringing remained with her. From that we might begin to understand to some extent of how Kent’s mother was raised. Second, Mrs. Kent both carried that culture with her and rebelled against it. After all, she did elope with Rockwell’s father, automatically disinheriting herself from the Banker fortune. She had a strong personality, and as Rockwell’s friend Carl Zigrosser says, was one of the few people who could stand up and challenge her oldest son. From his letters to her, we can see how much he needed her admiration and approval. Like his mother, Rockwell Kent both rebelled against this late-Victorian culture and dragged some of it along as part of his emotional baggage. I also think his young Austrian nanny, Rosa, played a critical role in creating his character, as did his mother’s younger sister, his Aunt Josie. An artist herself, she encouraged him and took him on a trip to Europe in his early teens.

Professionally and personally, Fox Island could be for Rockwell Kent what psychologist Eric Erickson called a moratorium. I realize that Erickson is talking about an adolescent shift between childhood and adulthood – but I believe it can still include a mid-life crisis period. Kent was 36 years old on Fox Island. In his letters to Kathleen he sometimes recognizes and mourns his aging. In Alaska, Kent eventually sees himself reborn, revitalized, and energized. He trods the line between success and failure – sensing he has produced a body of work that will finally gain him recognition, while at the same time recalling his failed return from Newfoundland. That fear, combined with his unstable marriage, perhaps makes him also lose his wife family. His rebirth, this new self he creates on Fox Island, fits into Kent’s reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche writes about the evolution of the creative soul metaphorically from camel, to lion, to child. In a sense, Kent’s creative spirit is moving in this direction, and the Fox Island interlude represents that transition period. See my discussion of  THIS ENTRY.

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PART 2

MORE THOUGHTS