NOV. 15 - 18, 2019 PART 5: INTO THE 1920s

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

Part 5 – Into the 1920s

November 15-18, 2019

ABOVE – Rockwell Kent with an unknown woman, late 1930s. The inscription reads, "Do you really have etchings there?" This photo and the one below from the Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, NY.

BELOW – Rockwell Kent, second from right, 1915-1920.

I’ll tell you that in order to produce good fruit, you need to espalier yourself. You’ll stay that way all your days, your arms stretched out, your mouth open to absorb what’s passing by, what’s around you, in order to draw life from it.

         Edgar Degas (1834-1917) in a Nov. 27, 1872 letter

The painter may not be a casual tourist letting his work be just a record of astonishment at novelty. Taking the term impressionism literally, we want much deeper insight than the term implies. To call scenes, cultures, peoples, people, persons, picturesque is to betray our superficiality; to no insider is life picturesque. Not until one can declare with truth, “This is my own,” can what he says of it have the authority of truth.

From It’s Me O Lord - IMOL (1955, p. 404)). Kent published a memoir in 1940 titled This is My Own.

you need to espalier yourself.

On his sea journey to join his family in France, Kent flirts with the women aboard the ship, especially a young Swiss governess. In Paris he spends the evening with her before joining his family. In Europe he tries to seduce the young daughter of a friend. David Traxel’s insight into Kent’s sexual attractiveness to women is worth quoting: To many, Kent also had an appeal that reflected the ambiguous position of the American artist and intellectual. In a society that honored the achiever over the dreamer, the practical more than the abstract, and action before thought, Rockwell Kent stood as the symbol of an intellectual masculinity. He was not only a talented artist and writer, but also an adventurer and man of the world. He could sail a boat or build a house, thrash a bully or move comfortably from a rough waterfront dive to a Long Island dinner party. He was a man who responded ecstatically to the beauty of women and of nature, and who seemingly could master both. (150).

Rockwell Kent was who he was. Years after his death, his third wife, Sally wrote, What is important to consider…is that Rockwell Kent was an incurable romantic and that his creative energies were heightened by the focus being in love gave to his work. He was that way to the end of his long and exceptional life. Nature, of course, in all its untamed and uncharged magnificence was the great stimulus to his art. But one has only to look at the range of his artistic work to see how often the women in his life were subjects and beneficiaries of his creative genius. (her preface to the Baxter Society facsimile edition of The Jewel: A Romance of Fairyland, a handmade, handwritten book Kent made in 1917 for Hildegarde.) In fairness, his women were not merely beneficiaries. Some he truly loved. Others were objects of his philandering. These women suffered as much as they benefited from their relationship with Kent, especially his wives. As his good friend Carl Zigrosser wrote a few years after Kent’s death, he wore out two of his wives.

ABOVE – From a review of Rockwell Kent’s second book in the Oct. 5, 1924 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It begins: It is not often that a book not dealing directly with art can find legitimate reason for discussion on the art page. Such a book, however, is Rockwell Kent’s “Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan.” Its publication…has made it the outstanding art event of the week, and the art critic may devote his columns to it without poaching upon the preserves of the literary editor. He may discuss it quite apart from its literary content, since Mr. Kent’s book exemplifies in superlative terms the art of the book.

BELOW – A review of Voyaging in the Oct. 5, 1924 The Tennessean that notes the Bayard Boyensen poem Kent uses at the beginning of the book. Who are you, city dwellers and armchair adventurers, to think you understand people like us, the poem asks – What should you know of us,/Us that have stars for our playthings,/Yea, stars that browse on our mouth! Kent is an anomaly within the insulated New York art world – an oddity with the art world.

After two divorces – in the early 1950’s now happily married to Sally – he looks back to his love life in a chapter he names “Transgressions.” Though writing about his 1916 encounter with Hildegarde Hirsch, he expands the thought: That a relationship so strangely and intimately begun should, even in the mundane lower world, continue, was inevitable; but not more so than that its consequences upon others should be serious and, as the years should prove, enduring. I believe that it was Shaw who stated that if the transports of love at its beginning, should be maintained, lovers would perish. But one might add, and I, in obvious rationalization of myself, do add that, conceding Shaw’s observation to be true, life without such love’s recurrence would be desolate. To how, in the interests of, on the one hand, the family and society and, on the other, of the countless individuals who are, by nature inflammable and avid for experience, the contradiction can be solved, I have no answer; nor should one whose marriage was, through his own actions, to suffer continuous deterioration, presume to offer a solution. One life – but one! – we have; and what a world, how varies and how vast! How it invites us, like Miranda, to cry out: O! wonder/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/That has such people in’t.

He admits to serious consequences to his wandering, that he is one of countless individuals who is by nature inflammable and avid for experience. He confesses his rationalizations. He has no answer to this contradiction, nor is he the appropriate person to suggest one. Still, he had wanted it all.

After writing the above, perhaps having many of his old letters spread out and stacked all around him – having recently turned 70 years old -- he recalls one message he wrote to Kathleen on Feb. 13, 1919 while he was on Fox Island trying to repair his marriage. Kathleen, ready to pack up and leave him, having suffered through his relationship with Jenny and now Hildegarde, opens her heart to him in these Jan.-March 1919 letters. She wonders what her life would had been had she never married him – perhaps a university education and a career in music. She gives him an ultimatum – it’s either me or Hildegarde. She loves him and misses him, but she’s also feeling the freedom and excitement of life in the city, away from his control. No need to come home, she tells him. I’ll be faithful to you, and I can take care of myself. Stay in Alaska and finish what you traveled there to accomplish. Fearful that upon his return this Alaska gamble may result in failure as did his Newfoundland venture, while at the same time losing his wife and children – Kent decides to leave for home. This, despite the fact that Kathleen has found a patron willing to back him $2000 so he can stay in Alaska several more months. He promises to leave Hildegarde and become a new man, faithful to his wife. This is what he wrote in that 1919 letter to Kathleen: Mother dear, your tragedy is the tragedy of all deep souls, of all who see life not as merely the little narrow path they tread but a limitless plain. You have raised your eyes, you have seen how pitiful small is the little track you follow and that is heartbreaking. But that it must be so is the sternest condition of life. We begin at one spot a journey to beyond the horizon. All that country of life is wonderful and fair and yet in only one little spot can we tread at a time and as we go on we who look back and see that what we have lost outshadows the little we have experienced. He paraphrases and expands upon on p. 321 of IMOL.

BELOW – Kent sketched this below his Feb. 13, 1919 letter to Kathleen. Archives of American Art.

We often see the Rockwell Kent quote: I wanted it all. He meant this literally, and it is one essential part of his personality-- his daemon – that played an important role in both raising him up and bring him down. I’ve written earlier about Kent’s focus on masculine virility and strength – we note all the dynamic naked men he draws while on Fox Island. His world view was embedded within a larger one. In American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000), Christine Stansel writes about the crisis of manhood that developed through the 1890 (when Kent was in his teens) and into the early 20th century: (The fact that Kent’s father died when he was five years old and that he was raised in a family of women also plays an important role in his attitudes) There were many factors contributing to this: Frederick Jackson Turner’s contention that the frontier had closed, sapping the essence of manhood; the rise of the women’s movement, especially the New Women who thronged to what became Greenwich Village; the rise of the Boy Scouts and Teddy Roosevelt’s emphasis on the strenuous life. Note how Kent works his son through strenuous exercises while on Fox Island. One reason for taking Rockie to Alaska was most likely to separate him from the influence of all the women in his family and to toughen him up.

As an adolescent, Kent attended the coeducational, Horace Mann school in Greenwich Village, founded in 1887 as a experimental unit of the Teachers College at Columbia University. In IMOL Kent admits, Unfortunately, however, some of us – previously conditioned to the artificial segregation of boys’ boarding schools – were neither modern enough to accept companionship with girls, nor honest enough to ourselves to admit or even to realize what tragic suppression of our own desires our belligerent resistance constituted. We, a small group of us, became woman haters. Determinedly avoiding the obnoxious other sex, we would seat ourselves t the rear of class roos, from thence observing with contempt the silly fluttering of female hands in blatant eagerness to advertise their owners’ smartness. Yes, we knew the answers too. But would we mix in such cheap competition? No. Kent and his group became known as trouble-makers. He goes on to describe how they tortured a young female student-teacher as she, he claimed, ruined good literature by over analysis. When asked to explain the significance of the color green in Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the boys’ suggestions ran from bull frogs to the Brazilian flag, from inch worms to chameleons when they sat on green leaves – even because green rhymed with seen. The boys turned literary analysis into an exercise in reductio ad absurdum. The next class found them facing a stern Professor Baker who would accept no nonsense. (pp. 47-48). The Horace Mann School separated the boys and girls into separate buildings in 1914.

BELOW: Rockwell Kent listed as a Horace Mann School graduate, from the June 6, 1900 New York Sun.

In American Moderns, Stansel focuses on gender issues during this period: And the undermining of customary gender relations fed into worries about other social instabilities, contributing to what contemporaries saw as a general failure of nerve among young men. Indeed, the concern over what might make an American man who could rule the country ran through many discussions in the 1890s that the era’s historians speak of a masculinity crisis. This loss of confidence was manifested in alarm of the supposed epidemic of neurasthenia among overly intellectual young men, in a celebration of sports and martial vigor and antidotes to the plague of effeminacy, in a vogue for body building (and its companion religion, Muscular Christianity), and, most famously, in the cult of the “strenuous life” and the “roughing it” in wild, restorative places with “primitive” manly men – Indians, cowboys, native guides. Kent was not alone with his sexual excesses and attitudes toward women. These were complicated times. I recommended Stansel’s book, especially Section IV: The Human Sex, with chapters titled “Sexual Modernism” and “Talking about Sex.” As some have pointed out, it is ironic that, though extreme in some ways, Kent was much more prudish than many others during that time. In many ways, though, he was the sexually attractive, dangerous man – the one mothers warned their daughters to avoid. But danger can breed attraction – as it did for Kent himself. He had presence and charisma and an self-confidence, at least on the surface. When he walked into a room, you knew he was there. Rockwell Kent was the Jack London and Ernest Hemingway of the 1920s art world – the adventurer artist – flitting in and out of the fictional world of F. Scott Fitzgerald between jaunts to places unknown.

Few other painters, if any, could compete with that image.

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PART 6

INTO THE 1920s