by Marian Kester Coombs
Whatever time it is, it’s time to appreciate Rockwell Kent. Americans
of his kind are so rare we have to keep punching ourselves to believe they ever
existed. It took me five chance encounters with this semi-forgotten figure –
three in used bookstores and two in art museums – to realize how odd and wrong was
my ignorance of him.
Rockwell Kent was one of America’s best-known, most popular painters
and designers in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Born in 1882, he hailed from
Tarrytown, New York, heart of the Hudson River School of painting, and showed
artistic ability from an early age. His ancestral Kents and Rockwells had come ashore
more than two hundred years before; in his second autobiography, It’s Me O Lord (1955), Kent traces his
ancestry back through a long line of carpenters and fierce freedom-lovers who
built fortune upon fortune in the New World. He grew up a member of America’s
founding generations: privileged, ingenious, self-confident, and liberal, as in
free-thinking. That masterful sense of self got Kent through many a scrape and
ordeal as he blasted lustily through life.
Kent’s cohort missed having to serve in the two world wars,
and were too canny and well-educated to be raptured by jingoism; nonetheless
they may have felt the need to test themselves physically and mentally in more
extreme ways than normal precisely because of that lack of opportunity to
soldier. Surely this may account for some of the wild risks Kent repeatedly
ran. He exulted in surviving close encounters much as warriors glorify war,
having come through it unscathed. Nonetheless, he was a lifelong pacifist, a
lover of Peace, a hater of War and its perpetual lobby; and if he was never in
a position to conscientiously object to induction, Kent made up for it by refusing
to kowtow to HUAC and having his passport revoked by the State Department.
Rockwell Kent loved painting and drawing and the making of
all things, from instruments to dishware, books to houses. His graphic
illustrations, employing pen and ink, dry brush, lithography, wood engraving (xylography)
and block prints, reveal the training in architecture he received at Columbia.
But oil painting was his “first love,” and by 1903 he was pursuing it at the
New York School of Art, where he encountered both the elegant William Merritt
Chase and the raw Robert Henri of the art-for-the-masses Ashcan School. Henri
encouraged him to get out and paint Nature and The People en plein air, suggesting Kent move to rugged Monhegan Island off
Maine to get started.
The Monhegan years kindled Kent’s fame. His contact with the
island’s fisher folk profoundly affected him, and thenceforth he felt the need
to become what he was painting:
lobsterman, laborer, house carpenter, furniture maker, well digger, lighthouse
keeper, sailor, farmer. When his Maine landscapes had their New York debut in
1907, The Sun’s art critic raved, “The
paint is laid on by an athlete of the brush.” Fellow painters were awed by his power to capture the spirit of land
and life in so many media. Guy Pène du Bois (with envy) called his work
quintessentially “American.” Canada’s Group of Seven were profoundly influenced
by him. He had a beautiful hand.
Monhegan also led Kent to the first of three wives: Kathleen
Whiting, niece of grand eccentric painter Abbott Thayer. Their union lasted
from 1908 to 1925, and saw the birth of five surviving children. Kent’s constant
impulsive or perhaps compulsive flights to the ends of the earth – the Alaska
Territory, Greenland, Iceland, Tierra del Fuego – where he could paint in peace,
engorged with exotic new subject matter (like Thomas Cole at Mont Désert or Frederic
Edwin Church in the Andes); live simply amongst the hardy natives (like Tommy
in “Brigadoon”); confront his true self, which he (like Zane Grey) believed could
be encountered “in the wilderness alone”; and, a bit less airy-fairily, gather
material for books to sell to support everyone – inevitably distressed his marriages.
A classic Rockwell Kent situation befell the family when
Kent decided in 1914 to expatriate and paint in Newfoundland. They’d been there
scarcely a year before being deported on suspicion that Herr Kent was a German
spy: he yodeled and sang German songs as he strode about, named his second
daughter Hildegarde, and refused to wallow in anti-Kraut vituperation. But Kent
was simply a convinced contrarian. Ideologies meant nothing to him. He was as
enthused by Teddy Roosevelt’s exhaustive vigor as he was by the Wobblies’ selfless
camaraderie. His notion of being an American was to champion “the little man” –
the man for whom America had been invented.
Another typical “situation” was his sojourn on a remote
Alaskan island with eldest son Rocky, then nine years old. “In quietness the
soul expands,” wrote Kent; wilderness held the seed, the evergreen promise of freedom, a promise that even democracies
continually betrayed. Anxious to provide for the family as well as slake his
growing passion for ascetic and aesthetic liberty in a Northern landscape, in
1918 Kent rented and rebuilt a lean-to on Resurrection Bay where the two of
them explored and beheld and communed. Although they both nearly perished more
than once, Kent returned after several months with the stuff of two
best-sellers (Wilderness: A Journal of
Quiet Adventure in Alaska and A
Northern Christmas) profusely illustrated with vivid ink drawings, but more
important, with a trove of canvases and sketches that have been called the most
successful effort ever to reproduce the beauty of the far North – the cold gold
glare of the midnight sun, the glacier ice that absorbs red and yellow spectra
and reflects back purest blue, the infinite tones of white – what Douglas
Brinkley calls “the kaleidoscopic radiance of wild Alaska” and Kent called its
“luminous abyss.” Monet expressed the plein
air painter’s struggle well: “I want to grasp the intangible. It's terrible
how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes three or
four minutes at most.”
In 1913, Kent was up in Winona,
Minnesota, constructing a mill when the Armory Show suddenly detonated without
him in New York. The snub stung him, but four years later, he himself broke
with the avant-garde by resigning from direction of the Society of Independent
Artists show over entries like Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. Along with
Hopper, Bellows, Wood, Curry and Benton, among others, Kent was not buying the
self-serving modernist myth that deliberate ugliness and nihilism were the
destiny of art.
In 1929, after returning from yet another near-fatal but
excitingly written and brilliantly illustrated adventure – yachting with two
other men from Newfoundland to Greenland, where they wrecked on a barren coast and
were rescued by Eskimos and Danes – Kent embarked upon yet another career as a
book illustrator. Moving easily in New York society, he designed colophons for
Viking Press, Random House and the Modern Library, logos still in use today. This
hectic urban phase included illustrations, influenced by his own memoirs of Greenland
(N by E) and Tierra del Fuego (Voyaging) for a three-volume limited
edition and Random House trade edition of Moby-Dick,
which revived the fame and fortunes of that nearly forgotten classic. The 30s
saw him much in demand by the publishing world: for Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales,
the complete works of Shakespeare, the memoirs of Casanova, the Decameron, Candide, Faust, Leaves of Grass and many more. Kent also
produced a spate of satirical drawings for the likes of Vanity Fair and Harper’s
Weekly under the name “Hogarth Jr.” During this period The New Yorker was able to tease, “That day will mark a
precedent/Which brings no news of Rockwell Kent.”
Diva Renée Fleming believes that the
most important quality for a voice is that it be “distinctive” – think of
Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Callas. Kent’s work was certainly of its time (and we all
know the style of one’s own time is “transparent,” invisible to those who are
within it), and yet is instantly recognizable as his, rippling with individual
energy; his kinetic, confessional writing style prefigures New Journalism.
Meanwhile, there was politics.
Kent’s career bestrode the Age of the Manifesto. The mad
intensity of the ‘20s, the “almost complete breakdown of our whole industrial
machine” in the ‘30s, and the escalating slide toward war of the ‘40s forced
artist to become activist. As he explained in This Is My Own (1940), the first of two formal autobiographies (though
all his writings are autobiographical),
I
believe in Peace and, as a clear and never-failing voice for Peace, in Art. … I
am ashamed of it; ashamed, … of my childlike innocence, my adolescent
credulousness, my fatuous belief. Roosevelt and the New Deal – can’t we recall
what faith we had in them in ’33? … Just let us live in peace. … Deeply and
from my heart, in utter reverence I pray: God damn them all.
Pacifism and noninterventionism were about to be
criminalized when in 1939 Kent was called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee to explain his views and associations. He denied,
honestly, being a Communist Party member, but would not disavow his red friends
and associates, who were legion. For instance, he had designed posters for the
IWW, contributed graphics to The Masses,
slipped rebellious slogans into his WPA murals, and served as an official of
the International Workers Order insurance society. In 1950 the government
revoked his passport; and in 1953 the Orwellian-named “Permanent
Investigations” Subcommittee tried to sweat him again on the subject. Senator
McCarthy interrupted the artist’s defense by snapping, “I’ll not hear a lecture
from you, Mr. Kent.” Kent retorted, “You certainly won’t – I get paid for my
lectures!”
Emerging from this inquest, where he had refused to answer
“Are you now or have you ever been?,” Kent was accosted by reporters who asked
the same question. This time he chortled scornfully, “No I am not and have
never been … and practically everybody knows that!” It was not until 1958 that
the Supreme Court in a landmark decision ruled his passport be restored
immediately.
After all the bad PR, however, Kent underwent what critic
Edward Hoagland calls “steep neglect of his work.” Galleries and shows were
closed to him, collectors no longer collected him. In 1960 he defiantly donated
eighty paintings and ten times as many drawings and prints to the Soviet Union,
where they repose to this day, in the Hermitage and Pushkin museums, among
others. In 1967 the Soviets awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, most of which he
gave away to charities … in North Vietnam.
Rockwell Kent was a gadfly, and a bit of a crank, who “just
wanted to be left alone”: an egotistical socialist, cosmopolitan isolationist, patriotic
globalist, home-loving adventurer, Christian nature-worshipper, avant-garde
antimodernist, philandering family man, “deeply misanthropic” humanitarian (per
Hoagland), democratic individualist, ecstatic engineer, bon vivant laborer – in many ways the painterly equivalent of resistance
poet Robinson Jeffers.
Between us moderns and men like Kent and Jeffers there is
not just a cultural but an anthropological
difference. The right-wing individualist of today is the social liberal of
yesterday. But the likenesses between Kent and William Blake, born 125 years
earlier, are so great that the former seems almost the latter’s reincarnation.
Both were mystics, worshippers of Liberty, yearners after the natural and
elemental Life, artists as well as philosophers, believers in Free Love,
calligraphers as well as painters, illustrators of their own writings, accused
of sedition, and hauled before tribunals. In addition Kent learned from Blake how
to draw the “Human Form Divine.” Unlike Blake and most other Symbolists, however,
Kent was adept at rendering individuals body and soul. His portraits of
Greenlanders in Salamina (1935) are alive. Unlike fellow landscape artists
Maynard Dixon and the Group of Seven, he caught not only that last thin yellow
ray of Arctic sun on the shoulder of the mountain but well-wrought parties of
humans and their gear. Kent’s vision of man in nature was an unusually balanced
one, reflecting his own Renaissance balance of gifts.
Quoth a Renaissance proverb: “A cat may look at a king.” It
is understood that feline nature disdains servility. British law goes so far as
to define cats as “free spirits,” “wanderers” – unlike dogs, which are property
that can stray and even trespass. Cats “are allowed to roam outside” and “are
not considered domesticated animals” under American law as well. A Kent too may
look at a king. His story, like the story of resisters such as Edward Snowden
today, demonstrates the necessity for multiple power centers, especially as the
world continues to massify into a smothering, elite-ridden globaloma. It is not
necessary that the center chosen for refuge be 100% righteous – merely that it
exist. The enemy of your enemy may not be your friend, but at least he differs
from your enemy.
Rockwell Kent, the erstwhile communist, reposes beneath a
stone that reads “This Is My Own” (from Scott’s “Breathes there a man with soul
so dead/Who never to himself hath said,/’This is my own, my native land?’”). He
died in 1971 on his Plattsburgh farm, called Asgaard after Nordic myth, just up
the river from his New York birthplace, near the Vermont and Canadian borders.
A
friend of Blake wrote after his death, “His aim single, his path straightforward,
and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy. He was a man without a
mask.” Rockwell Kent, too, lived a free man - one of the last of the Americans.
