Background
Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown Heights, New York, United States on June 21, 1882.
( Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was probably the most importa...)
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was probably the most important American book illustrator of the 1920s and '30s. Today there is a revival of interest in his illustrations, and this volume brings together for the first time the best of his illustrations from 24 books, as well as magazine art, bookplates, and advertising material examples in all. Many of his most famous illustrations are included, with several selections each from Candide (1928), Moby Dick (1930), The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (1930), Salamina (1935), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1936), and Goethe's Faust (1941), among others. Illustrations for lesser-known works such as A Basket of Poses (1924), Venus and Adonis (1931), and To Thee, America! (1946) are also reproduced. The entire collection is dominated by Kent's highly individual style of formalized realism and by his well-known subject matter heroic, or sensual, male and female figures and dramatic scenes of nature, usually in a far-off wilderness. Concentrating on the exceptional works of the '20s and '30s, the volume does include some early material from 1914 and 1915, and a selection of later work from the 1940s and from Rockwell Kent's Greenland Journal (1963). Fridolf Johnson, for many years editor of The American Artist and a respected designer, has written a new introduction tracing Kent's development as an illustrator, captions for the illustrations, and an annotated bibliography of the works represented. The illustrations have been selected by Fridolf Johnson with the collaboration of John F. H. Gorton, Director, The Rockwell Kent Legacies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486233057/?tag=2022091-20
(Profusely illustrated and printed on very nice cream stoc...)
Profusely illustrated and printed on very nice cream stock, this book catalogs Kent's entire lifetime output of pritns, posters, engravings, woodcuts - even scarves. The book is b&w - folio sized 9x5x12.75.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226406237/?tag=2022091-20
Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown Heights, New York, United States on June 21, 1882.
Rockwell Kent studied architecture at Columbia University. However, he became a painter, studying with William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and others.
He was deeply involved in the agitation against the National Academy of Design led by Henri and John Sloan and was an exhibitor in the famous Armory Show of 1913. This was the limit of his commitment to revolutionary art, however, for the workers he idealized in his paintings and drawings were usually outdoorsmen and other solitary types-trappers, fishermen, and other such individualists-rather than the urban, assembly-line workers most often thought of as the subject of socialist concern. Kent was a remarkable man. Perhaps because of his political beliefs, but probably out of some deeper feeling for reality, he worked at various times in his life as a lobsterman and carpenter along the coast of Maine and as a ship's carpenter. He lived in Alaska, Newfoundland, and Greenland, drawing many of his best-known pictures of the people and their activities there. In a small boat he explored the waters off the southern tip of South America. Kent wrote and illustrated Wilderness (1920) and Voyaging Southward (1924), which many critics consider the best American books ever produced in terms of harmonious balance between text and pictures. Along with Fritz Eichenberg, Kent is as responsible as any artist for the high level of American book illustration during the first half of the 20th century. His illustrations, like his paintings, often create a mood of loneliness and a sense of man's small resources against the might of nature. Among the authors he illustrated are Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Herman Melville.
(When artist, illustrator, writer, and adventurer Rockwell...)
(Profusely illustrated and printed on very nice cream stoc...)
( Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was probably the most importa...)
A socialist from an early age, he apparently saw his work as growing out of a general socialist respect for workers.