Rockwell Kent "Wilderness" Centennial Journal

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 Part 4 – Into the 1920s November 12-15, 2019 ABOVE – This is the image of Rockwell Kent the press presents to the public as his fame trends in the 1920s. He’s not just a painter, he’s the essence of adventurous manhood -- virile and pugnacious; dangerous and desirable; distant, yet an intelligent and sophisticated charmer one could easily meet in New York high society. In the Buffalo Truth for Oct. 23, 1924, columnist Enid Strong writes, Last night I went to the first Playboy ball of the season. Three affairs of its kind are given...by Egmont Arens. {Playboy was a serious art magazine put out by Arens, not the modern magazine of that name} Many celebrities were at this costume ball, including Kent himself, his close friend George Chappell, writer Heywood Broun, Frank Crowinshield, Charles and Albert Boni, Hugo Gellert, S.J. Kaufman, Deems Taylor, and Charles Houson Towne. B...

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 Part 2 – Back from Tierra del Fuego November 7-10, 2019 ABOVE – Another Misty Day in Seward – Photo by Jim Pfeiffenberger. Looking northwest. The slope of Mount Marathon at far left. Benson Mountain in the center. Mount Ascension at right. BELOW – Captain Joshua Slocum on the Spray traveling through the Strait of Magellan. Pen and ink by Rockwell Kent, from A Treasury of Sea Stories (A.S. Barnes & Company, 1948) The 1920s With Black Tie and Dinner Coat In the decade of the 1920s, Rockwell Kent was perhaps more “social” than at any other period of his career. He often went out in society with black tie and dinner coat, and moved, in New York or at Long Island estates, in the circle of the Ralph Pulitzers, the Watson Webbs, the Whitneys, and Gordon Abbott and his wife, Katherine, who later became Mrs. J. Cheever Cowdin. (134)     ...