'Rockwell Kent: The Mythic And The Modern' At Portland Museum Of Art

With more than 130 paintings and works on paper, the exhibition explores Kent's output in the period between the two world wars, his impact on American culture and his role in the evolution of modern art in this country. It underscores his mastery of many media, the sources of his distinctive style and the mythic, timeless quality of his oeuvre.

Through this show and catalog, curator Wien breaks new ground in explicating the development of Kent's artistry and his engagement with modern art and ideas. Among other things, Wien demonstrates that "it's not accurate to call Kent a realist." The curator notes that the artist constantly reordered nature, moving mountains closer and shifting peaks in and out, all the while simplifying forms and shapes.

Among other things, the exhibition demonstrates how Kent advanced his modernist vision during sojourns in Maine (where he first arrived, on Monhegan Island, a century ago), Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego and Greenland. Particularly on these visits to remote regions Kent echoed Henry David Thoreau, who posited that "the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled."

Wien stresses "planting Kent squarely in the transcendental tradition." He says that "Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman remained touchstones for Kent; his wilderness paintings reflect an intimacy with their writings." Kent, he adds, was a "visual interpreter of transcendental thoughts."

Born into a well-to-do family in Tarrytown Heights, N.Y., Kent showed early artistic promise. After studying at Cheshire Academy and Manhattan's Horace Mann School, he spent three summers painting outdoors with the celebrated William Merritt Chase at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island.

While pursuing architectural studies at Columbia University, Kent took evening courses with master instructor Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League. Wien offers new insights into the manner in which Dow's stress on the importance of balance and symmetry in composition and admiration for Japanese prints profoundly influenced the 20-year-old Kent.

Before dropping out of Columbia in his senior year, Kent began evening classes with realist titan Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. Along with fellow students George Bellows and Edward Hopper, he absorbed their charismatic teacher's advice to find subjects in the world around them.

Kent's 1903 summer stint as a studio assistant to landscape painter Abbott Handerson Thayer in Dublin, N.H., strengthened the young artist's interest in Japanese art. He also learned from his eccentric mentor the virtues of living close to nature and the rewards of a spartan existence in cold climates. In 1908, Kent married Thayer's niece, Kathleen Whiting.

Kent's New Hampshire paintings suggest an almost mythical reverence for nature. Deftly composed and astutely colored, "Dublin Pond," "A New England Landscape" and "Mt Monadnock" (from the Portland Museum's collection), all painted in 1903, are accomplished canvases that reflect the impact of Dow and Japanese prints.

Duncan Phillips, the astute collector who founded America's first modern art museum in Washington, was an early admirer and patron of Kent's work, purchasing two interesting paintings, "The Road Roller," 1909, and "Burial of a Young Man," 1908-11, which he called an "American masterpiece."

In 1905, Henri introduced Kent, as he did Bellows, Hopper and other pupils, to the grand scenery and rugged beauty of Maine's Monhegan Island. Unlike most of his fellow artists, Kent lived on the island all year round for five years, permitting him to depict the isolated setting in all its frigid, snowy glory. While working on his art, he worked at various menial jobs to make ends meet.

Inspired by Monhegan's precipitous cliffs, pounding surf and forested landscape, Kent created some of the most memorable canvases of his career. In "Toilers of the Sea," 1907, one of the great American seascapes, he underscored the hard life of Monhegan fisher folk as they haul in their catch while being buffeted by waves against the dramatic backdrop of the island's towering headland, Blackhead.

Two stark, snow-laden landscapes, "Winter - Monhegan Island," 1907, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and "Maine Coast," 1907, from the Farnsworth Art Museum capture the frozen silence of the island in winter. Other noteworthy early depictions of Monhegan's oft-painted Blackhead are the starkly realistic "Maine Headlands," 1907, and the same site, animated by pounding waves, "Headlands and Sea," 1910.

In a more lovely and lyrical vein are "Afternoon on the Sea, Monhegan," 1907, and "Manana in Winter," 1907, while "Late Afternoon on Monhegan Island," 1906/07, offers a sun-surmounted, but more somber scene. The latter two are on loan from painter and Kent admirer Jamie Wyeth, who owns the house Kent built for his mother on the island.

Kent left Monhegan amidst controversy and did not return for decades. In 1914, he took his wife and three young children to Newfoundland, seeking an Arcadian way of life. Ensconced in a little fishing village on Conception Bay, the artist reveled in proximity to the water and the area's unspoiled nature. Although put off by the anti-German sentiments of Newfoundlanders, he came to admire their resilience and spirit of adventure.

Before he and the family were forced to leave Newfoundland on suspicion that he was a German spy, Kent produced some subdued, almost melancholy paintings. As Wien writes in the exhibition catalog, "Themes of destiny, suffering, the afterlife and the perpetual cycle of creation and death permeate" these canvases.

"Pastoral," 1914, is a kind of dreamscape in which a softly rounded human figure and several animals are posed against a rich green, undulating landscape, rocky headlands and a dark blue sea. One particularly attractive and colorful result of Kent's sojourn is "Conception Bay, Newfoundland," 1916, owned by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, which has an impressive collection of the artist's work.

Kent's Newfoundland series, while reflecting concern about World War I, also signaled stylistic moves in the direction of modernism and universality. They represent, in a sense, a response to the introduction of the European avant-garde at the Armory Show of 1913.

In 1918, Kent created a fascinating group of paintings on the backside of glass. These brightly hued, astutely composed works, such as "Baby with Blue Bird" and the Portland Museum's "Maiden with Parasol," are highly appealing revelations. (Curator Wien's study of these reverse glass paintings is in the July issue of The Magazine Antiques.)

That same year, Kent took his 9-year-old son with him to settle for a time in an abandoned cabin on tiny Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, south of Seward, Alaska. In this beautiful, remote setting he created canvases conveying his awe at the vast expanse of Alaska's snow-covered landscape and the effects of sunlight on the terrain. Highlights include two outstanding pictures from the Bowdoin Museum's trove: "Pioneers (or Into the Sun)" and "Resurrection Bay, Alaska (Blue and Gold)"; one beauty owned by the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, "Alaska Sunrise," and an especially compelling canvas from the Portland Museum, "Resurrection Bay." All date to 1919.

During Alaska's long winter nights, Kent read works by such favorite authors as William Blake and Friedrich Nietsche, the latter of which inspired such memorable brush and ink drawings as "Zarathustra and His Playmates," 1919. Strong ink drawings also contributed to the success of his memoir, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, 1920.

Returning to the United States, Kent lived for several years in Sunderland, Vt., where paintings such as "The Trapper" and "Sundown," both 1921, reflected the natural beauty of the area.

In 1922, Kent impulsively set out on a six-month freighter voyage to Tierra del Fuego, attracted by its celebrated foul weather and the difficulty of getting there. On that bleak archipelago off the southern tip of South America he explored the rugged terrain on foot and gathered observations for a group of simplified and somber depictions of mountains, lakes, glaciers and sea scenes. Compelling ink drawings illustrated his narrative of his Tierra del Fuego sojourn, Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan, 1924).

Kent's extended absences from home heightened tensions within his marriage. He and Kathleen divorced in 1925. The following year, Frances Lee became his second wife.

In 1929, Kent made the first of three visits to Greenland, where, says Wien, he "achieved his fullest expression of artistic modernity." He returned in 1931 and 1934, immersing himself in the local atmosphere and making many friends.

Kent's exposure to the Inuits and their environment intensified his appreciation for the overpowering forces of nature and the glory of the optical effects of polar light. His Greenland paintings implement Dow's advice about the "value of imaginatively reshaping the natural world," Wien observes. In depicting distant glaciers, he notes, Kent "brought them forward in his compositions, enlarging them and endowing them with the force of primordial symbols."

In "Artist in Greenland," circa 1939, Kent depicted himself working at an easel attached to his sledge and facing icebergs frozen in place for the winter. One is struck by the silence and majesty of the white setting.

In spite of his absences from the United States, Kent retained a prominent position in the art scene, and also used his celebrity to attract commercial work to support his large, extended family. His lively, fluid black and white renderings graced the pages of such publications as Harper's Weekly, New York Tribune and Puck. Kent's jolly "Dancing Around the Maypole" appeared on a cover of Vanity Fair in 1923. His graceful ink drawings, often mocking the foibles and pretensions of upper class society, signed "Hogarth, Jr," accompanied the writings of Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker.

After much research, he created his famous brush, pen and ink illustrations for a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In a characteristically powerful image, "Night and Stars (or Moby Dick Rises)," the great white whale explodes out of the sea. "Whale-boat and Crew Tossed into the Sea" shows men flying into the water from their precipitously pitched boat.

Other successes included illustrating Paul Bunyan, Beowulf and Canterbury Tales.

The advertisements, book designs, book plates and other commercial work of the 1930s were plentiful and widely admired. Bread and butter assignments included ads touting automobiles and pianos.

After the period examined in this exhibition, Kent's involvement in left-wing organizations and support for the Soviet Union got him into hot water and eroded his reputation. His third wife, Shirley (Sally) Johnstone, whom he married in 1940, was a loyal ally through decades of controversy.

Kent's confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his gift of hundreds of his works to the Soviet Union further fanned the flames of public hostility. The latter move had "dire consequences for his legacy," Wien observes, "not only because these artworks disappeared from the marketplace but also because they were sequestered behind the Iron Curtain and thus were virtually inaccessible to a generation of American art historians." (Four works from Russian museums are included in the current exhibition).

When he died in 1971 at the age of 89 on his Adirondacks farm, Kent's obituary made the front page of The New York Times, but much of the story was devoted to his political involvements rather than his art accomplishments. Now, more than three decades after his death, with the political distractions surrounding his later career dissipated, it is clear that Kent's paintings and graphic work deserve to be ranked among the finest achievements of Twentieth Century American art.

As curator Wien observes, "Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern" is a show "that should have been done 25 years ago." Kent is an artist to be savored and remembered - and appreciated for posterity. As Wien concludes, Kent's "passionate engagement with modern art and ideas...place him among his generation's most admired painters and draftsmen, a mystic seeker often interpreting the spiritual zeitgeist for a modernizing America."

The 188-page catalog, written by Wien and based on years of research, is published by Hudson Hills Press in association with the Portland Museum.

The Portland Museum of Art is at Seven Congress Square.

For information, 207-775-4178 or www.portlandmuseum.org.