Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska―Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal
(In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son settl...)
In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America's premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their 7-month odyssey describes what Kent called "an adventure of the spirit." He soon discovers how deeply he is "stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world" as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent's drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space -- both external and internal -- at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.
(1933 First edition. "Few words and many pictures by R. K....)
1933 First edition. "Few words and many pictures by R. K." "and by Carl Zigrosser, "A bibliography and list of prints". The bibliography is of the writings and illustrations. Includes reproductions of Kent"s drawings, prints and paintings. Heavily illustrated with full-color frontispiece, and many plates, particularly at the back of the book. From Rockwell Kent's statement at the end of the book: "This book of reproductions of an artist's work is, as a book, itself SPECIMEN of that work. It should bear his signature - and shall. Yet he may not thus lay claim to it without acknowledging however reluctantly, that perhaps its best qualities are the work of its makers, THE LAKESIDE PRESS, nor without confessing that where his own hand as a book designer faltered it was sustained and steadied by The Lakeside Press's William Kittredge - without confessing that and thanking him. No work of art, no matter how robust its qualities can bear bad reproduction. No artist tolerates it. Seeking, for the pictures of this book, the best available process of reproduction, that known as the Donnelly Deeptone Process was chosen. It was a new technique in offset lithography and, by its nature, offered itself impartially to the reproduction, either in color or in black and white, of those varied media - painting, drawing, wood engraving, and lithography - which were to be represented int he book, and promised to reproduce, without the sacrifice of clarity and brilliance, those subtler values which were essential to the pictures." -- Rockwell Kent
(World Famous Paintings, Rockwell Kent by Rockwell Kent . ...)
World Famous Paintings, Rockwell Kent by Rockwell Kent . New York : Wise & Co., Inc., 1939. Early Edition. 200 pages. Oversize. Leather. decorative pastedown. Lightly distressed binding, covers, pages
(First published in 1935, Salamina details artist and adve...)
First published in 1935, Salamina details artist and adventurer Rockwell Kent’s second trip to Greenland. Salamina unfolds as a series of vivid vignettes, each illustrated with Kent’s bold black and white drawings. Through his accounts of fishing trips and Christmas festivities, shared meals and budding friendships, Kent acquaints us with the Eskimo and Danish inhabitants of the small vibrant community of Igdlorssuit. Both the native people and the forbidding Arctic landscape held a special beauty for Kent, and he describes them with an artist’s eye. Salamina is Kent’s Eskimo housekeeper (kifak), who becomes a central figure in the book when she and her daughter come to share Kent’s small hut for the year. Kent’s wry self-reflection and his poetic meditations on nature, humanity and love make this an enduring classic of travel literature and artistic quest. This Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by art historian Scott R. Ferris that highlights the cultural importance of the text and illustrations and shows that for Kent, inspiration comes from life.
(The Prints of Rockwell Kent: A Catalogue Raisonne Hardcov...)
The Prints of Rockwell Kent: A Catalogue Raisonne Hardcover
Dan Burne Jones
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(Author), Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent (Illustrator)
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(Illustrator), Carl Zigrosser (Foreword) .
(
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was an artist of extraordinar...)
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was an artist of extraordinary drive, talent, and versatility; he embraced life with exuberance. And though he was one of the most popular American illustrators of this century—so much so that The New Yorker published the ditty, "That day will mark a precedent, which brings no news of Rockwell Kent"—the controversies engendered by his socialist leanings, particularly during the McCarthy era in the 1950s, frequently overshadowed his artistic achievements. His major art was inspired by his extended stays in remote, sparsely inhabited and climatically harsh regions, most of them islands, to which his imagination was drawn for a mythic association with the mystical and marvelous.
Distant Shores captures Kent's great enthusiasm for the sea and mountains, and the relationship between nature and humanity. Produced to accompany a traveling exhibition of the artist's work, this handsome volume features eighty paintings, prints, and drawings, (more than fifty in full color) related to Kent's sojourns in the wilderness—Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland. Included in this collection are works from The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg that have been unavailable to the public since the early 1960s. Kent's dramatic black-and-white illustrations for Herman Melville's Moby Dick—the engravings that popularized his work in the United States—are also featured.
The essays describe Kent's career as a painter, printmaker, book designer, illustrator, and prolific writer. Constance Martin contextualizes the work in the exhibition by providing an informative and insightful background of Kent's life and art. Richard West contributes fascinating details about Kent's childhood and early adult life, his mastery of the print medium, and his involvement with American political thought during the McCarthy period.
The Illustrations of Rockwell Kent: 231 Examples from Books, Magazines and Advertising Art (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
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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.
(Combines a lavish collection of Kent's wood engravings, l...)
Combines a lavish collection of Kent's wood engravings, lithographs, paintings, book illustrations, designs, and emblems with an anthology of selections from his books of travel, autobiography, and from unpublished letters and includes an extensive biographical introduction
Rockwell Kent was an American artist, author, and social activist. During his lifetime, he worked as an architectural draftsman, illustrator, printmaker, painter, lobsterman, ship's carpenter, and dairy farmer.
Background
Rockwell Kent was born on June 21, 1882 in Tarrytown Heights, New York, United States to Rockwell Kent, Sr. , a prosperous attorney and mining engineer, and Sara Ann Holgate, a homemaker. For the first five years of his life, Kent lived in luxury, wintering in New York City, summering on Long Island, and spending spring and fall in suburban Tarrytown. In 1887, however, his father died after contracting typhoid during a business trip to Honduras. Rockwell was not told of his death; but as the family quickly entered a period of straitened circumstances, he guessed what had happened and reacted with anger and, often, wild behavior.
Education
Kent was shipped off to a military boarding school at the age of ten, supported both by scholarships and by a great aunt. That same aunt, Josie Banker, was an artist who noticed Kent's talent while he was still quite young. During the summer of 1895, she took Rockwell to Europe with her. In Dresden she studied the art of ceramic making and painting. When they returned, she purchased a kiln and began producing china herself. Kent assisted with the painting to earn money for his now needy family. Although he eschewed the style of the china, he ably executed the delft windmills and cottages featured on the pieces
As Kent settled down somewhat, he was withdrawn from military school and became a day student at the Horace Mann School in New York City. He very nearly did not graduate from Mann in time to enter Columbia University on a scholarship to study architecture. He failed French and had to pass a last-minute test at the end of the summer of 1900. He then spent two years at Columbia, participating in a number of outside activities, including the drama club, the humor magazine, and Phi Delta Gamma fraternity. Yet his studies were not nearly as interesting to him as his summer and evening art studies, first with William Merritt Chase and then with Robert Henri. Both opened up new worlds for Kent. In 1902 he dropped out of Columbia to become a regular student at the New York School of Art, which was associated at that time with the realist painters.
Career
In 1905 Kent moved to Maine to paint, supporting himself with odd jobs, and putting his architecture training to work by building his own house. His family regarded him as a failure, a dropout who earned money digging ditches and whose socialist politics and personal habits--vegetarianism, in particular--were quirky. Not until his first show of fourteen seascapes painted in Maine was exhibited in the spring of 1907 in Tarrytown did his family begin to accept his talents as an artist.
As Kent's artistic skill grew, so too did his interest in socialism. As an art student, he observed and painted urban scenes and explored the poorer sections of New York City. In his autobiography, Kent credited Robert Henri with teaching him to use his heart as an artist, to attain an emotional connection with his subjects that sometimes resulted in politicized pictures. A family friend who was a Christian socialist introduced Kent to the ideals of the movement. Several years later, while living on Caritas Island, Connecticut, he met several of the more prominent socialists in the United States who were his neighbors, including Mary ("Mother") Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Rose Strunsky.
He visited Newfoundland three times to paint and planned to open an art school on a remote bay there, but he was expelled from Canada in 1914 because his friendship with local Germans and admiration for things German caused the government to suspect him of being a spy. In 1923 he sailed around Cape Horn in a small sailboat named the Kathleen and spent time painting on Tierra del Fuego. In 1931 and 1934 he made lengthy trips to Greenland.
After each trip, Kent showed his canvases and also wrote of his experiences. He had himself incorporated as Rockwell Kent, Inc. , in 1916, and sold shares in himself to finance the writing of Wildnerness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (1920). In 1924 he published Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan, and in 1935 he published Salamina, a narrative of his two Greenland trips. During the 1930's he did many etchings, some with political overtones. Some lithographs, including the 1937 Workers of the World Unite! , were influenced by the style of socialist realism common in the Soviet Union. Kent kept busy in other ways during these years. In 1927, with money inherited from his mother's relatives, the Bankers, he bought a farm in the Adirondack Mountains near the small village of Au Sable Forks, building his own house and barn. Named Asgaard Farm, this was his home base for the rest of his life.
In the 1930's, he found that publishers were interested in using his lithographs and woodcuts to illustrate classics. The best known of these was the 1930 edition of Moby Dick, but he also illustrated Candide, Beowolf, and many of Shakespeare's plays. Under the name of Hogarth, Jr. , he did satirical and humorous drawings for Vanity Fair. Occasionally Kent also did paid illustrations for ads, including Rolls Royce, and unpaid illustrations for political causes.
Kent's most political phase began in the 1930's and continued until his death. He belonged to both the American Artists' Congress and the League of American Writers, two creative front groups. He tried to organize artists for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Kent supported Communist party candidate Earl Browder for president in 1936, and when Browder was convicted in 1940 of providing false information on a passport application, he headed the New York state chapter of the Citizens Committee to Free Earl Browder in 1941. He also led the Soviet-American Friendship Society for a time. In 1937, he made national headlines when, on a postoffice mural he painted in Washington, D. C. , he lettered in minuscule script and using an obscure Innuit dialect a message supporting independence for Puerto Rico. The government resisted having to pay for his political statement, but Kent had a contract and collected his $3, 000 fee. Once the Post Office Department officially owned the mural, the text of the message was expunged. Kent supported the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and became the foster parent of a Spanish refugee child. In 1939, former Communist party member Benjamin Gitlow identified Kent as a member of the party before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Kent's first autobiography, This Is My Own (1940), defended the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Soviet Union's invasions of Poland and Finland. In part because of his politics, but also because of the rise of abstract expressionism as an artistic style after World War II, Kent's popularity as an artist declined after the 1930's.
Kent never lost his taste for left-wing politics. He was vice-president of the International Workers Order, a left-wing fraternal benefits society, off and on during the 1930's and 1940's, and was its last president when the federal government rescinded its charter at the peak of the McCarthy era. He was named as a member of the Communist party before the Un-American Activities Committee again in 1949 when his name topped the list of Americans belonging to allegedly subversive organizations. Kent belonged, the committee claimed, to at least eighty-five such communist front groups. In 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy subpoenaed Kent, who refused to cooperate, pleading the Fifth Amendment. That same year, he was denied a passport after he refused to sign an affidavit swearing he did not belong to the Communist party. He sued to get a passport and, in a case that went to the Supreme Court, won. In his local community, Kent campaigned for Progressive party candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 and organized a district branch of the American Labor party (ALP).
During World War II, Kent had begun to bottle and sell the milk produced on his New York farm. His political activities in that year prompted a local boycott of what he facetiously called "Russian milk. " The boycott grew larger and larger until Wallace himself got wind of it; while Kent assured Wallace that it provided good publicity for the Progressive party ticket, he also admitted that the boycott had cost him $15, 000. The boycott was so effective that he abandoned the idea of running the dairy any longer, gave the business to his employees, and advised them to change its name and move the dairy away from Asgaard Farm to avoid any negative political associations.
That same year, Kent himself decided to go into politics, declaring his candidacy for the House of Representatives on the ALP ticket, which was more liberal and internationalist than the Democratic party. Kent was responsible for an ALP proposal advocating the creation of a Department of Culture. A third-party candidate stood little chance of getting elected under any circumstances, but Kent antagonized many in his own small party. His campaign was a disaster; he was heckled during many of his speeches, and attacked by the American Legion. Kent never lost his determination to make a grand gesture in the name of his political beliefs.
As he grew older, Kent continued to paint, write, and follow politics. He traveled to Europe several times, both before and after his passport case was settled. In 1955 he completed his lengthy autobiography, It's Me, O Lord, taking the title from a spiritual. His politics made it difficult to publish and also difficult for him to place paintings in museums. In 1953, after Kent's testimony before McCarthy's committee, the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, declined Kent's offer of paintings because the museum's trustees thought him too controversial. Thereafter no other museums expressed any interest in his works until the Soviet government mounted a traveling Kent exhibit in 1958 and bought paintings for the Hermitage and Pushkin museums.
In 1960, Kent decided to distribute his growing collection of some eighty paintings and eight hundred prints to friends. Thus, when lightning struck his Asgaard farmhouse in 1969 and burned it to the ground, not all of his works were lost. Kent, his family, and friends rebuilt the house, where he died at the age of eighty-nine.
Achievements
Kent was a popular artist in the 1920's and 1930's. He was extremely versatile, using different mediums and capturing different types of subjects. His early seascapes were particularly renowned, but his figure drawings and paintings were also much admired. His illustrations of Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, Greenland won his art great popularity. His works were displayed in many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He also produced a range of print media, including advertisements, bookplates, and Christmas cards.
In 1967, the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, which carried a $28, 000 award. Kent asked that $10, 000 of the money be donated to the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam for medical supplies.
(1933 First edition. "Few words and many pictures by R. K....)
Politics
During his life, Kent was affiliated with different parties such as the Socialist Party of America, Communist Party, and American Labor Party. He was an early and vocal opponent of American participation in the war.
Membership
In 1966 Kent was elected to the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts.
Connections
Kent married Kathleen Whiting on December 31, 1909. She was the niece of Abbott Thayer, a naturalist painter who influenced Kent, particularly as he began to paint seascapes. The couple had five children, but their marriage was not a happy one. Kent also had a mistress, identified in his memoirs only as "Janet, " by whom he had a sixth child. At one point he tried to move Janet and her son into the family circle, but both women balked. The Kents finally divorced in 1926. Kent's wanderlust had put additional stress on his marriage.
After a two-week courtship, he married Frances Lee of Virginia on April 5, 1926. Lee was a young divorcée with a small boy. Kent first met her at a cocktail party on Long Island.
He was married for a third time in 1940 to Sally Johnstone, an English-born, Canadian-educated young woman Kent hired as his secretary.
