Rockwell Kent "Wilderness" Centennial Journal

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018-19 May 6 - 11, 2019 ABOVE – “Victory”—one of Rockwell’s Alaska drawings reproduced in the May 18, 1919 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. BELOW – Text of the review accompanying “Victory.” Rockwell Kent has been back in New York for a few weeks now. The crowds, the noise and the grime irritate him. The world again , he wrote in his autobiography nearly 30 years later. But what a world for travelers from Utopia to come to! From the wide open spaces of big Alaska, as Rockwell had observed it to be, to the tight shut spaces, the stone canyons, of little New York; from the status of Man dwelling in the presence of God, we shrank to that of insects in the hive of Mammon. Some of his friends who had studied with him under Robert Henri – they could paint the alleys and ashcans of the city if they wished – but not Kent. Bellows, Hopper and Sloan – they would