JANUARY 4-7, 2020 PART II: THE ALLURE AND MAGNETISM OF ROCKWELL KENT

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2019

Part 2 -- The Allure and Magnetism of Rockwell Kent

January 4-7,  2020

ABOVE – Headline for Gladys Baker’s interview with Rockwell Kent in the January 22, 1928 Birmingham News (BN).

BELOW – A photo of Gladys Baker appearing with an interview and profile of her from the September 29, 1929 issue of the BN. The caption beneath the photo reads: Miss Gladys Baker, Birmingham News-Age Herald feature writer, whose ability to put personalities into words and phrases has received favorable comment of the most conservative critics in New York and Europe. Her interviews with famous personages have been reprinted in publications in France, Turkey and India.

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

A comment made by a newspaper man in the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance directed by John Ford – with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Lee Marvin. At the end of the film, a newspaper man refuses to print the true story about the man who really shot Liberty Valance because the legend about the supposed shooter had become more universally accepted and compelling.

BELOW – Image from Wikipedia

When I discovered the article, I was expecting it to be more like an art review. I refer to  newspaper piece about Rockwell Kent by Gladys Baker in the Jan. 22, 1928 BN. But the revealing portrait was based upon an interview conducted by one of the most noted and respected journalists of that time with a special talent for profiles. Baker met and interviewed notables like Andre Maurois, G.K. Chesterton, Alfred Adler, Alexander Kropotkin, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rabindranath Tagore, Kahlil Gibran, Gertrude Atherton, Mussolini, Douglas Fairbanks, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bergner, H.L Mencken, Irvin Cobb, Fanny Hurst, George Ade, Eugene O’Neill, Al Capone, Bertrand Russell, Nan Britton, Gene Tunney, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Adm. Richard Byrd. She interviewed so many famous people who were pleased with the result, that by the 1930’s the stories behind her interviews became news events themselves – and reporters competed to interview her.

During one radio program – before the interview even began, Baker commented – But I ought to warn you that this is a novel experience for me – being asked to talk. And I’m not sure that I haven’t forgotten how. This surprised the radio host and she replied: What! After talking with a thousand of the most famous men and women of our time? Baker’s answer gives us an insight to her process. She fully understood the psychology of the celebrity personality. That’s just it, she explained. I didn’t talk with them. They got started on their favorite subject – which is always themselves – and it was all I could do to get in an occasional “uh-huh” or “aren’t you wonderful!” (BN, Sept. 10, 1933, p. 39)

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BELOW – Gladys Baker on radio, from the Sept. 10, 1933 BN

She had a flair for publicity. For a story published in Dec. 1927 she sat in the Sing Sing Prison electric chair for 75 seconds – the time it would take to execute two murderers on Jan. 12.  By the time she met Kent in 1928, he was well known and admired. Baker may have read Wilderness and Voyaging, or at least the reviews, and had keyed into the public interested in the man. The mysticism of Wilderness and the Alaska art most likely attracted her interest in Kent. She was a seeker, spiritually, and interviewed Kahlil Gibran the year before. Of Gibran, Baker wrote: A rare combination of richness and simplicity runs through the work of Kahlil Gibran, whose genius burns like a candle. One finds the silver and the gold of the Renaissance combined with the simple tenderness of the peasants, who toil in the fields and vineyards of Lebanon, pervading his creations. Reeling before he beauty of his expression, one is strangely humbled by the finality and truth of his simple statements. (The BN, Dec. 11, 1927, p. 59). Though she interviewed Jiddu Krishnamurti, I haven’t located that article -- but the interview probably occurred in Aug. 1926 when the mystic landed in New York for an American visit. We find several mentions of Krishnamurti in Wilderness. Of Rabindranath Tagore, who she interviewed in 1931, she wrote: Part of the Eastern teacher’s creed is that man can realize his part in the scheme of the universe only by living close to the great heart of Mother Nature. She quotes the mystic, “Our temple of worship is there, where outward nature and the human soul meet in union.” Baker adds, Tagore’s transcendent love of nature and his feeling of absorption – oneness – with its various manifestations, permeates his poetry. (BN, Feb. 1, 1931, p. 47)

BELOW – Gladys Baker’s profile of Rabindranath Tagore in the Feb. 1, 1931 BN.

Later in life Baker, converted to Catholicism with the help of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen – and she described that experience in her 1951 book, I Had to Know – which she wrote the year before in a Boston hospital while suffering from a rare form of anemia. Her 1955 novel, Our Hearts Are Restless, is about Georgia Gale, an alcoholic, and includes other unstable characters – a woman with a series of broken marriages, another who commits suicide, and a talented yet stifled musician. One reviewer wrote that Baker’s spiritual awakening and development and the realistic handling of the problems which crop up make it a readable and thought-provoking novel. (Fort Lauderdale News, May 8, 1955, p. 54).

Baker begins her profile of Rockwell Kent in novel style with her subject at a Philadelphia train station on his way back to New York. With his companion, a girl he calls Heloise in his autobiography, It’s Me O Lord (IMOL) – he had just viewed the opening of the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It is 1903, and Kent is in the second term of his junior year at Columbia University studying architecture, but strongly leaning toward a career in art. Gladys Baker writes:

 It was a still, white night in January. A young man paced up and down the station platform in Philadelphia, for a midnight train waiting to take him back to New York and his classes in architecture. He was a solitary figure. He had bared his head to the wind, which swept icily around the corners of the buildings and he was not conscious of the fact that his cap was crushed between restless, working hands. # He had just come to an important decision; one that was apt to change the entire course of his life. He was thinking of the howl they would put up at the university and how the instructors would repeat that his prepatory {sic} work showed rare skill in the profession which his parents had selected for his career. A letter Kent publishes in IMOL from Columbia University Professor, R. Ware attests to his talent in architectural studies and Ware's empathy as why he wanted to pursue his painting. How others react to him abandoning his studies would be another matter.

Baker continues:  His parents, in turn, would offer stern opposition and withdraw their assistance. They had discussed the question on many other occasions and they would insist again that it was nothing short of a disgrace to have an artist bear the aristocratic family. True, up to this time he had tried to see the thing from their viewpoint, but he was convinced now that no flattery on the part of his instructors or persuasion from is parents could shake his determination to go about the business of painting pictures.

Would Rockwell Kent’s family, especially his mother Sara, find it a disgrace to have an artist bear the family name? Was this how Kent told the story to Baker? Perhaps. I’m reminded of the career of Edith Wharton and her novel The Age of Innocence (1920), and how she describes the narrow and stifling upper class social scene of 1870’s New York. I wrote earlier how difficult it was for the new-monied Vanderbilts as they challenged the Astors to get onto that social register. At eleven years old, Edith Wharton wrote a novel in which Mrs. Brown arrives at Mrs. Tompkins’ home. If I had known you were going to call, Mrs. Tompkins says, I should have tidied up the drawing room. When young Edith proudly showed this attempt at literature to her mother, she responded icily, Drawing rooms are always tidy. That did it for Edith who turned to poetry rather than fiction.

ABOVE – Edith Wharton. Photo from Wikipedia

BELOW – Sara Kent about 1885 with Rockwell at left and his brother Douglas. Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University.

Wharton's life was not unlike that of Rockwell Kent’s mother who was raised in wealth by the Banker family. Her uncle, James H. Banker was connected in business with the Vanderbilts. In IMOL, Kent writes that his mother was Banker’s pet, his companion for a somewhat loveless life; his joy, his minion and his slave; his property to have and hold his own for life. I’m reminded of how women like Gloria Vanderbilt were raised (see her diaries) and how they later rebelled. Rockwell seemed ambivalent about his mother. In his letters, especially the Alaska ones, we see his dependence upon her money and his apparent need to be held in her esteem. She was a rebel, endangering her inherited fortune by eloping with Rockwell’s father against Banker’s wishes. Her husband died only a few years into the marriage. She was one of the few people, according to Carl Zigrosser, who wasn’t afraid to challenge her son. In IMOL Kent recalls returning home from college one evening to find Sara weeping by the fireplace over a box of letters. They were her husband’s, and she was burning them. Rockwell convinced her to stop, saying he had the right to know more about his father. He was five years old when his father died in 1887, and Kent recalls his embarrassment at Sara taking him to dancing school dressed as a little Lord Fauntleroy.

BELOW –Little Rockwell all dressed up. Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University.

He also remembered his mother’s snobbery, not allowing him to play or invite into their home the neighbor children who were not socially worthy. Some of the pretensions and snobbery Wharton describes in her writing most likely infiltrated the Kent home. In her memoirs, Edith Wharton wrote: In the eyes of our provincial society, authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labor I expand upon all this to suggest that the argument over Kent’s abandoning his Columbia studies may have been closer to how Baker described it than how does Kent in IMOL. 

Baker continues her introduction: The exhibition had done it. He had spent the whole afternoon standing in wonder before a collection of America’s finest works of art. The colors remained with him. Everywhere he looked he saw bright blues, dull mauves and gleaming yellows. The allure of it had somehow got ahold of him and he was powerless to resist its call. In one illuminating moment he knew life held no meaning for him unless he could express his emotions with brilliant bits of paint. # And then it was that he turned his face up to the keen night air and a patch of midnight sky showed him the North Star shining brightly. He stood as if rooted to the spot for it seemed as if, at that moment, a strange kinship was born between them. It claimed him then and there for a disciple of the Northland. It bade him seek the bleak frigid wastelands; it led him on to untried shores where one companions with snow and ice and piercing blasts and loves it. He secretly and gladly swore allegiance. He knew from that moment he was a free soul and that henceforth he would follow the promptings of his spirit.

BELOW – From the New York Tribune, January 25, 1903.

Is Baker taking some liberties in her creation of this Rockwell Kent moment of clarity that January night in 1903? Most certainly. It is clear, though, that she's getting most of this information from Kent himself. I am also impressed with how well her narrative melds with what Rockwell Kent wrote in IMOL more that 25 years later about this exhibition and his response to it. Crowds of people and crowds of pictures, he wrote.  Important canvases hung on the line, and less important ones hanged over it; portraits of people, some with people’s names attached and many coyly titled after what they wore – “The Yellow Shawl,” “Gardenia;” some, even more coyly named for seemingly extraneous accessories – like “The Chinese Vase,” or “Saffron Sniff-box;” and landscapes with red barns, and cows in pools; and indicative of Whistlerian influence, Studies or Symphonies in Red, Blue, Mauve, Green, Gray. In other words, Art with a great big capital A (73). Notice all the colors Kent lists that raided his sensibilities – colors mentioned by Baker in her narrative. He writes that he looked earnestly, if not always reverently, at all the paintings. Then it was time to leave, from both the show and Heloise, and catch the train back to New York.

Did Kent relate to Baker that he gazed up at the North Star and then and there decide to point his compass north? Perhaps. Regardless, Baker could have easily imagined that from reading Kent’s letter to his patron, Dr. Christian Brinton at the beginning of Wilderness. Kent writes: I came to Alaska because I love the North. I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins. Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands. I love this Northern nature, and what I love I must possess. If she had read Voyaging, perhaps Baker realized it wasn’t necessarily the North that attracted Kent. It was wilderness – solitude, desolation, union with nature, a state of mind -- for as he ventured southward toward the Strait of Magellan, Kent wrote: Forever shall man seek solitudes, and the most utter desolation of the wilderness to achieve through hardship the rebirth of his pride. Kent confirms Baker’s words as he recalls in IMOL It was a different man who boarded the train at the Broad Street station from that one who had landed there a few hours earlier. “If these people are artists,” he said to himself, “then so am I.” An architect had left the train; a painter now rode home (73)

Baker now brings us up to 1928. More than 25 years have passed since the young man on the station platform held communication with the Star of the North in the silent midnight hour. At the time he was Rockwell Kent, student of architecture at Columbia University. Now he is Rockwell Kent, one of the foremost figures in contemporary art in America. # In addition to the sound position he occupies in the realm of modern art, he is also one of the most compelling personalities of this century. His autobiography…would be an absorbing narrative. Because of its thrilling adventure it would be the kind of book little boys would eagerly reach for; young men facing life would realize that trials and limitations may be changed into glowing experiences; the unimaginative would feel champagne flow through their veins and catch a glimpse of what it means to take life at its flood and wrest from it a series of glamorous soul-satisfying adventures.

Gladys Baker has now set the stage for her readers to meet and hear the words of this extraordinary artist. And so, she writes, it was not without curiosity that I kept my appointment with Rockwell Kent.

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PART III

THE ALLURE AND MAGNETISM OF ROCKWELL KENT