JANUARY 13 - 16 PART 4: THE ALLURE AND MAGNETISM OF ROCKWELL KENT

100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

Part 4 -- The Allure and Magnetism of Rockwell Kent

January 13-16, 2020

ABOVE – Rockwell Kent circa 1929-30. The caption on this photo says: Rockwell Kent, of America’s most famous and woodcut artists, returned recently from Denmark. Last summer his boat the Direction, foundered {in} a fjord forty miles from Godthaab, the capital. The near tragedy happened during a storm which threw the 33-foot craft on the rocks. At the wreck, Rockwell searched material and some unfinished paintings which were saved and brought to America. This photo shows Rockwell Kent where he was staying in Shelton, New York. Kent detailed this voyage in his third book published in 1930 by the Literary Guild, N by E. It not only contained his pen/brush and ink drawings, but also several wood engravings. The book became a Literary Guild selection and spread his name and reputation further throughout the country and the world. Kent is the oldest and only one with any survival experience on this voyage. He warns his young shipmates, college men, about anchoring in such a dangerous location. They don’t listen. It’s their boat and they’re in charge. As the wind picks up and the vessel gets knocked around and the others try to get to land, Kent heads below deck to save what he can. David Traxel describes what happens in his biography of Kent: Chaos. Books. beans, shelves and drawers, pots, pans, shoes and boots jumbled on the cabin sole, shaken churned and hurled every few seconds as the boat pounds against the ledge. Kent calms himself, tries to curb his imagination. He methodically sets to work: matches, dry place to keep them, food, kerosene for the stove, alcohol to prime, then the stove itself; all shoved into a sack. He carefully takes the chronometers, wraps them in clothes and blankets, places them in the sack. His sextant follows, then his most precious possession: his father’s silver flute, then the movie camera, and more blankets. # The mate stands at the hatch and shouts form him to come out. Kent hands up the sack, then scurries forward over the sundering debris to the fo’c’sle, where his wife’s picture looks out over the havoc. As he places the photograph under his clothes, over his heart, he thinks of the scene his romantic gesture will prompt from her. (May I remind you here that Kent's third wife, Sally, would say that her husband was an incurable Romantic?). Grabbing what else he can of his personal belongings, he makes his way back through the ruined cabin and climbs to the deck # There are only moments left before the cutter will sink. Avoiding the main boom, which thrashes back and forth across the deck, Kent follows the Mate over the side. Swimming and wading, then climbing, they get ashore. Kent helps the Captain secure the masthead line around a boulder; no sooner done than the surging boat breaks the three-inch manila like twine. She is sinking now. Kent jumps to a bag, pulls out his movie camera and films her slide beneath the waves. Kent also manages to save the diary he had been keeping. Only hours before he had written, And tomorrow, I paint! (Traxel, 2-3). That was not to be. He settles his young ship mates under an overhanging cliff, cooks up some soup, with hot chocolate and soggy bread. A chart has been saved and Kent notes some kind of settlement several miles away, but it’s not clear whether he can reach it by land. At age 47, Kent starts off in the cold rain to seek help, while his young shipmates shiver on the cold and wet Greenland coast. Although this event and the book that describes it takes place after Gladys Baker’s interview with Rockwell Kent, it enhances his allure and reputation as this country’s premiere adventurer-artist. Photo source.

BELOW – Rockwell Kent, circa 1929, about the time he was interviewed by journalist Gladys Baker. Can you look into those same eyes into which Gladys Baker gazed during her 1928 interview with Rockwell Kent, listen to him tell his stories, absorb that smile? Can you begin to understand the energy, confidence and charisma the man emanated? Can you see what made him so attractive despite all his faults? Photo source.

The Allure and Magnetism of Rockwell Kent

Part 4

the shape of a man’s hands, the strength of his neck and shoulders

When I walked into my apartment, I found waiting for me a short, stocky man in his mid-fifties, as ragged and rugged as any of the marchers I had left. I like people to look their part, and if they are workers, to look like workers, and if they are peasants to look like peasants. I like to see the shape of a man’s hands, the strength of his neck and shoulders… {I saw} a short, broad-shouldered workingman with a high, broad head covered with graying hair. His face was weather-beaten, he had warm grey eyes and a wide, pleasant mouth. The collar of his shirt was dirty, but he had tried to dress up by wearing a tie and a suit which looked as though he had slept in it. (As I found out afterward, indeed he had.}

         Dorothy Day, describing her first meeting with Peter Maurin in 1932, with whom she started the Catholic Worker Movement. From the chapter “Peasant of the Pavements” in The Long Loneliness (1952), and from a collection of comments about Maurin by Day in The Catholic Worker, called On Peter Maurin found at THIS LINK. 

BELOW – Peter Maurin. Photo Source

First impressions are important even if they are inaccurate – perhaps, especially if they’re inaccurate. Although she doesn’t use the word, what Dorothy Day absorbed from her image of Maurin on that day in 1934 was his authenticity. He was real. Reality isn’t necessarily positive, it’s just…real. Part of Maurin’s authenticity was that he rarely bathed and the odor was noticeable. And he rarely stopped talking. He had a prophetic vision and wanted to spread it. He was also kind and generous, and tried to practice radical Christianity to the extent that made some uncomfortable. He and Dorothy Day had their differences, but she later acknowledged that the Catholic Worker Movement would not have achieved what it did if hadn’t been for Peter Maurin. I want to make it clear here that I’m not comparing Rockwell Kent with Peter Maurin. I’m focused on first impressions, authenticity, the person behind the mask, reputation and personality. Dorothy Day eventually got to know the man behind the first impression. Gladys Baker gives us one insightful glance into the swashbuckling allure that – along with his talent and art -- made Rockwell Kent so famous so quickly.

Gladys Backer describes to us her first impression of Rockwell on that damp, gray and sleeting winter afternoon in early 1928 when she left her New York studio at 305 West Seventy-Fourth Street that looked over the gardens of the Charles Schwab estate and the Hudson River. (The article was published on Jan. 28 in the Birmingham News). The weather indicated snow would soon follow. Baker had done her research, as she always did before interviews. She knew about what she called Rockwell Kent’s unique history. It was an advantage, she said, that turned the meeting into a highly important event. As a former newspaper reporter who did many interviews, I can tell you that your subjects are much more open to talk if they hear evidence that you’ve done your research. Writers promoting a book, for example, usually know immediately from the questions if the interviewer has even read their work.

Gladys Baker found Kent’s apartment building at Washington Square – an old red-brick structure – entered, and hiked up the narrow stairway looking for a sign of his name by a door. At the very top floor she finally located his apartment, rapped on the door and, a cheerful voice bade me enter. The first impression I had of the artist was that he was not an artist at all; at least, not the velvet-jacket, Windsor-tie variety. The man in front of me might have been a miner or an engineer, judging from his stocky physique and deeply tanned face. I caught at once the absolute realness of the man. One knows instantly that there will be no affectation or superficiality in his conversation, mannerisms or voice. You expect him to talk to you about the Army-Navy game, or the Dempsey-Tunny battle or the chances of Al Smith for the Democratic nomination. We all know there was another "real" man beneath the image Baker describes. But this was the persona that skyrocketed into celebrity status during the 1920's.

BELOW – A section of Gladys Baker’s portrait of Rockwell Kent found in the January 22, 1938 Birmingham News.

Although this is 1928, the image of the pretentious aesthete artist of the late 19^th and early 20^th century still lingers. The Gilded Age had elevated the business world to the male domain, and it not only became a masculine domain but also a symbol of manhood. Art and literature still had more feminine connotations, and some the early modernists male writers and painters found that attitude an obstacle they had to overcome. Baker is not only surprised at Kent’s working-class appearance, she is shocked that his “studio” looks more like a workshop. It is long and narrow, she writes, and there is not a sign of soft draperies or rugs. Its only furnishing is a large pine table, which holds his tools and materials for executing those charming wood cuts and scattering about in careless disarray are brushes and palettes and paint. Against the walls, stacked one against the other, are a number of canvases. Above is a skylight. Gas jets furnish the only illumination. That is all. No luxury, no softness, no divans, or pillows, or incense, or glowing log fires. The very atmosphere of the place teems with activity. Here one feels the nimbleness of eager fingers, the rapidity of conception and the satisfaction of finished work.

BELOW – The Aesthetic Movement. Photo Source.

Like many, even today, Baker seems to have misconceptions about the kind of hands-on, grunt work that artists do. I’m reminded of a story Rockwell tells in a 1969 recorded interview available in the Kent collection at the Archive of American Art. As a young man attending William Merritt Chase’s summer plein air workshop classes at Shinnacock Hills, Kent recalled how elegantly dressed his teacher appeared each day. Chase used to tell his students there was no need to get dirty while painting. He compared painting to surgery. A surgeon doesn’t get covered with blood doing his work, and neither should an artist get covered with paint. Chase grew up in a different world than that of his students. Still, if one had visited the studios of Degas or other impressionists and sculptors in 19^th century Paris, one would have found studios similar to Kent’s and artists with dirty hands. Yet, the apparent misconceptions behind Baker’s ideas about artists is held by many during Kent’s time, and this image of a working artist may seem unique to her readers. I write of Baker’s “apparent” misconceptions because it is possible she really understood artists but there was just something different about Rockwell Kent himself and his studio.

ABOVE – Auguste Rodin’s studio, circa 1900. Photo source.

At the time of the interview in 1928, Rockwell Kent is 46-years-old, married now to Frances, with five children he had with Kathleen. Only Rockie is old enough to have begun college. What Baker writes next probably indicates how little is known about Kent’s personal life among the general public, and gives us insight into the kind of information Rockwell didn’t reveal during the interview. Rockwell Kent’s personality brims with the vigor and zest of living. I do not know his age, but in his case the question of age will never matter. I have heard he is the father of six children, several of them in college, and so, according to the calendar, he has reached the middle ground of maturity. But his lithe movements, his quick gestures and his lightening responsiveness speak of a youth eternal. His naturalness makes you feel as close to him as your next-door neighbor. It is the utter simplicity of the man which hints at his greatness.

Ten years earlier Kent had bemoaned his aging while on Fox Island in his letters to Kathleen. He is approaching forty and realizes his youth disappearing. On Feb. 13, 1919 he wrote to Kathleen: Sweetheart, I have my hours of bitterness. Do you not know that my nature is complex. That with all my harshness I too could love society and forever gay and jolly times, and sport, my horse, tennis, the gay seashore, dancing, the attentions of women. I am not an outcast, not one who cannot mingle with people and be liked and admired and loved.  I’m still young and strong. I have brains and charm and confidence and sex attraction. I mourn the passing of these – but I have had to choose. I mourn the flight of years, the hair gone from my head and the gray hairs on my temples. Would you have me forsake the choice I have made… Remaining young, both in body and spirit, was important to him. The still, deep cup of the wilderness is potent with wisdom, he wrote in his Alaska book, only to have tasted it is to have moved a life time forward to a finer youth. Striving, fighting, competing, defying – and all that in wild, stark landscapes -- helped keep him young.

Like the old Chinese proverb, Baker notes, our experiences leave an imprint behind our eyes – and the crystallization of all Kent’s adventures seeking liberation of spirit and mind have left their mark. Kent’s eyes are continually alight. They gleam with humor, intensity of feeling and spontaneous happiness. He has that divine gift of being able to live entirely in the moment. I think he is not concerned very much about the future and certainly not at all about the past. There is a certain defiance in his attitude, such as you’ll find with men who have good reason to know that, no matter what happens they cannot be bested by life. This last sentence by Baker moves us to a cold spring night in 1969 when Rockwell Kent’s house at Asgaard was struck by a bolt of lightning and burned to the ground. At one point, when firefighters got the blaze briefly under control, they allowed the 86-year-old artist to enter the building. Much was lost, but Kent found his way to the bar and snatched his favorite Greenland painting off the wall. Then he and Sally (who he had married in 1940) sat in their Chevy with the heater on and watched the blaze flair up creating, as David Traxel writes, a flaming mountain of treasures and memories. Books, paintings, drawings; polar-bear skull, narwhal rusk, walrus tooth engraved with Arctic scenes; precious carvings, handmade boxes, homemade furniture; Hogarth mirrors, Navajo rugs, mother’s Seth Thomas clock, father’s flute, father’s tools, Steinway concert grand; map-covered walls; photographs of friends, files of letters and notes – all joined in a roaring Viking blaze.. Fortunately, most of the correspondence was saved, including those letters to and from Alaska. But the destruction was all too difficult to watch. Kent asked his wife to drive behind the barn so they wouldn’t have to see anymore. But early the next morning architect-trained Rockwell Kent started the design for another house. Forty-one years earlier, in 1928, Gladys Baker had seen into Kent’s psyche. He did live in the present. He was a defiant rebel who wouldn’t let life take him down. No matter what happened, Kent refused to be bested by life. He and Sally did rebuild. (Traxel 213).

BELOW – Rockwell Kent in Greenland. Photo from the Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University, NY.

In later years, Kent’s politics began to usurp his art career. By time he died in 1971, the headlines of almost all his obituaries – and there were many – emphasized his political stances rather than his art. Now in 1928, perhaps, another element of his life begins to overshadow his art. Baker writes: Because Rockwell Kent, explorer, is even more interesting than Rockwell Kent, artist, I shall leave it to the critics to tell of his worthy contributions to American art. I shall let them tell how his separate canvases fetch prices expressed in four figures and how he has already achieved the success that usually crowns a man’s efforts in the realm of art after he has passed along. I shall let them say how the demand for his gem-like wood-cuts would bring him fame and fortune in this métier alone. I shall let them record how his seascapes are permanently hung in the great art galleries of the United States and important private collections; how he has served and is serving on juries of selection of the most telling exhibitions in America. Of how he is editor of “Creative Art,” a new magazine which is receiving meritorious recognition both here and abroad.

What could possibly compete with Kent’s art, Baker wonders? Could it be the life itself? Rockwell Kent the explorer and adventurer? Rockwell Kent the personality? One would think that, having mounted the top rung of the ladder of fame, the artist might possibly find pleasure in a country where his name is mentioned with the truly great. But Rockwell Kent is ever poised for flight. All that is necessary to set him off to the ends of the earth is a map showing a name of Last Hope Inlet, Dead Man’s Bay or Desolate Reach. He is known as a painter of the wilderness. It is in places uncrowded by civilized man that he finds his greatest inspiration. I think this is why we find him as a youth going penniless to the seacoast of Maine…

Baker writes about Kent building his small hut on Monhegan Island – with his own hands, of course. She focuses on his earning his living as a laborer, especially his time as a lobsterman. Then she mentions his trips to Newfoundland and Alaska, making it sound like he and Rockie were in Newfoundland when they skated on a blue frozen surface of the lake under the clear light of the moon. That had been on Fox Island. But Newfoundland and Alaska wasn’t enough for Kent, Baker exclaims. And even then the beckoning voice would not let him alone. He must fit out a small boat and go sailing around the end of Cape Horn.  It didn’t occur to him that he might be wrecked or drowned or eaten by the Straits cannibals or that he had no money to provide clothing and food. Lack of money perhaps made the risk more thrilling, more of a challenge. If all he could afford was a leaky 18-foot dory with a finicky engine, then that's what he would use. And he could always trade his art or labor for what he needed. A working man with many skills can always get by, he tells her, always smiling: “I was a first-class carpenter and lobsterman and could usually find work along the way…Besides, my father had bequeathed to me a silver flute with tunes from which I could always pick up a few coins here and there.” Baker then describes Kent as piping along mountain passes in the dreary wastelands of Tierra del Fuego and many times narrowly escaping being drowned or starved or frozen as he continued on his perilous way.

ABOVE – From the frontpiece of Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan by Rockwell Kent. For the importance of the flute as a cultural symbol of the Romantic attitude, see THIS LINK.

BELOW – Later in life, Kent at Asgaard playing his flute. Photo from the Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University, NY.

Gladys Baker was a seeker herself, searching along mystical trails for answers to life's enigmas. I wondered as I sat chatting with him if while he was following the star of the North in these long hours of solitude, he found the answer to that great question which tears at the hearts of all thinking persons in every age. If, indeed, this were the thing which urged him on and on. Rockwell showed her a picture of he drew or painted called “Denis,” one he had done in Ireland a few years back. It was that of a young man lying beside a lake, Baker wrote, and in the distance were rugged mountains giving the effect of infinite space. 

This may be Denis McGinley, an elderly man Kent and Frances met in Ireland a few years earlier on their honeymoon. Kent mentions him in his autobiography,  It's Me O Lord  (IMOL 1955). Rockwell and Frances spend time with McGinley and his family, eating and drinking. Kent writes, Then Denis in his cracked old voice would sing old Irish songs, and we'd know why he was reputed such a singer in his youth. Kent and Frances decided that he will stay and paint more in Ireland and she will return to the states. In this passage from IMOL, Kent may be writing about his last dinner with the McGinley's: What toasts we drank! What songs we sang! "Mr. Kint," said Denis, who was as fine an orator as he once had been a singer, "I want to say that never in all our years have we known such a lady and gintleman as Mrs. King and you. May all happiness attind you all your lives. And may god bless you both. "Denis McGinley," I replied, "I've travelled north and south and east and west in search of mountain peaks; but never until here and how have I found peaks whose summits reached so near to God as do you men of Donegal." (pp. 419-422)

NOTE -- In mid-Feb. 2020 I found two articles by Kent scholar Will Ross in The Kent Collector -- Summer 1991. The first is titled "The Case of the Missing Lecturer;" the second is "Kent Works in the Utah Museum." Ross covers this story quite well. I may summarize the Ross findings later when I write about Kent as a lecturer -- but for now, I want to acknowledge that Ross writes about the Denis painting and traces it to where it is today.

Bakcr continues: That spiritual quality with which his works are imbued seemed for a moment to envelope the room, and the pale gray light of the somber afternoon, falling through the skylight, heightened the effect. Baker suspected that Kent himself was the dreamer beside the lake who had found the answer to that unanswerable question. Certainly, she observed, the spell of infinity creeps into the brush of almost all of his work. His famous woodcut, “Over the Ultimate,” is so symbolized that the richness of its meaning goes on and on even after familiarity dulls the perfection of its line and tone.

BELOW – Over the Ultimate. Photo source.

Ironically, Baker concludes, those images of infinity, those expressions of mysticism are only found in Kent’s work – You will not find a single trace of mysticism about Rockwell Kent, the man, she writes. His robust figure, his breezy personality and the ever-present humor in his eyes belie the meditative quality of his art. To look at him and talk with him, one feels that he has spent his entire life exploding time-honored theories and laughing roguishly in the face of established customs and forms. As for me, I am inclined to think that instead of wandering in Tierra del Fuego, he has stolen a march on all of us and has been scampering about in Cabell’s land of Polctesme. Here she refers to the fantasy world created by James Branch Cabell in The Biography of the Life of Manuel, a popular series through the 1920’s. Just like Cabell, Rockwell Kent had his maps to go along with his adventures. Though places like Fox Island and Tierra del Fuego were real, to most readers they may have seemed as far away and mystical as did Cabell’s magical world.

BELOW – A map of James Branch Cabell’s mythical land, Polctesme. Photo source.

Before you leave, I ask that you go back to the beginning of this entry and look closely into the eyes of those two photographs of Rockwell Kent. Now, imagine that you are just meeting him first time in 1928 as did Gladys Baker. You’ve done some research, but all you’ve read are his books and some reviews and articles about him. You have not read his private letters. You know nothing about his marital troubles, his affairs, his moods, or the demons that drive him. Go back in time. Perhaps then you can imagine the allure and magnetism of Rockwell Kent. It isn’t just his art. It isn' just his adventuring. It’s the whole personality. Gladys Baker is seeing mostly that swashbuckling face Kent puts forth to the public. Yet, she is able to, I believe, penetrate somewhat into the real Rockwell Kent that his friend Egmont Arens enjoyed talking with that day in the city. If you’ve read this website from the beginning, you’ve had a taste of the vulnerable, manic, demanding, perfectionist, overly idealistic, sometimes unstable man we view occasionally in the letters. Keep in mind that, though Rockwell Kent’s intimates and friends knew something of his private life, back in 1928 the general public knew little. Now Glady's Baker was not naive. She may have known more about Kent than I'm guessing here. But as a popular journalist whose career was on the rise, she was smart enough to agree with the adage: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

NEXT ENTRY

I’ll introduce you to one more woman in Rockwell Kent’s life, an individual we know little about. We also know little about their relationship. Yet what we do know is that she is one more of those interesting yet pretty much forgotten characters of this historical period.