SEATTLE — Richard Vincent West (1934-2026) passed away on February 22 at the age of 91. He was director emeritus of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Wash. After completion of graduate work in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, West was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship at the Cleveland Art Museum in Ohio and subsequently at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.
Shortly after being appointed director and curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, Maine) in 1967, West befriended the artist Rockwell Kent, which led to the organization of the last major exhibition in that artist’s lifetime, “Rockwell Kent: The Early Years.” The occasionally dramatic events surrounding that exhibition were described in “Recalling Rockwell,” which appeared in the 2005 exhibition catalog Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern, organized by the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art.
In 1977, West published an article, “Rockwell Kent Reconsidered,” in the American Art Review, which contributed to a new appreciation of an artist whose career had been obscured by the political and artistic events of the mid Twentieth Century. In 1985, West organized and curated a major Kent painting retrospective at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “An Enkindled Eye: The Paintings of Rockwell Kent.” The exhibition toured nationally.
The emergence of Kent as a painter early in the Twentieth Century and the political and domestic issues that faced Kent in postwar America are described in the essays “Before the Odyssey” and “After the Odyssey” in Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent, organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in 2000.
West made presentations at numerous symposia dedicated to Kent and his art over the years and compiled an annotated checklist of Kent’s Alaska paintings, with Scott R. Ferris (www.rockwellkentpaintings.com).
In his role as curator and museum director, West had also been a staunch advocate of contemporary representational art: he was trustee emeritus of the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle and served as a founding trustee of the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Wash. He also served as a board member of the Philharmonia Northwest chamber orchestra; and vice-president of the Thalia Music Library, a non-profit organization providing music to many community classical music groups.
West is survived by his wife, Carole, and their daughter, Jessica. He is interred in Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent, Wash. There were no services.
