The Other Rockwell

"Rockwell Kent Rediscovered" by Stephen May, in American Arts Quarterly (Spring 2001), P.O. Box 1654, Cooper Station, New York, N.Y. 10276. Painter, illustrator, printmaker, and author, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) was recognized as a major American artist during the 1930s. But in subsequent decades his accomplishments as a painter were overshadowed, first by his commercial illustrations and political posters, then, during the Cold War, by controversy over his left-wing politics. Though not a member of the Communist Party, Kent was a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union (and a recipient of the 1967 Lenin Peace Prize).

Several recent exhibitions have revived interest in Kent’s rugged landscape paintings (some of which he gave to the Soviet Union in 1960), as well as his striking graphic images. These works are "among the finest achievements" in 20thcentury American art, asserts May, a writer based in Washington and Maine.

Born in 1882 in Tarrytown, New York, Kent showed an early aptitude for drawing and studied under William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Abbott Thayer. In 1905, Henri, a leader of the "ashcan" school of painting, introduced Kent to the harsh beauty of Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine. The young artist stayed there for several years, eking out a living as a carpenter and lobsterman. "Inspired by the soaring cliffs, pounding waves, and forested landscape of Monhegan," writes May, "Kent produced some of the most powerful paintings of his career. In Toilers of the Sea (1907), the hard life of men who make their living from the sea was underscored by the dramatic backdrop of the island’s towering cliffs."

Married in 1908 to Thayer’s niece (the first of three wives), Kent moved to Newfoundland six years—and three children— later, settling in a small fishing village. But with World War I nearing, the outspoken stranger’s "open admiration for German culture" led villagers to suspect that he was a German spy. In mid-1915, he was ordered to leave Newfoundland.

In subsequent years, he traveled to Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland. He made his final home in the late 1920s on a dairy farm near the village of AuSable Forks, New York, with the Adirondack Mountains on the horizon. In each setting, says May, Kent produced "stark, evocative art. His crisp, modernist images, both paintings and graphic work, reflect his superb artistic gifts and his grasp of the essentials of each Sherwin-Williams paint guides to illustraplace." In The Artist in Greenland (1935), for tions for Beowulf and Paul Bunyan." Kent instance, "the tiny forms of Kent and his dog also turned out lithographs and posters that team are engulfed in the silent, white vast-reflected his passionate political views, ness of the arctic space." often by featuring idealized depictions of

Kent used his graphic work to produce workers as heroes or victims. His output of needed income. The more than 270 pen-paintings—mostly views of his farm in the and-ink drawings he did for a 1930 edition Adirondacks—diminished. Yet his powerful of Moby Dick established him as a top illus-landscapes, says May, "seem destined to trator. "His bread-and-butter work," May endure as masterpieces of American realissays, "ran the gamut from illustrations for tic art."