Kent's small oil-on-wood-panel sketches from Alaska-uniformly horizontal studies of light and color-were exhibited at Knoedler's as "Impressions." Their artistic lineage to the small and spare oil sketches of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), which are often entitled "Arrangements," underscores Kent's admiration of Whistler's genius.Īpproached in 1926 by publisher R. The New Statesman (London) described Wilderness as "easily the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass was published." Upon the artist's return to New York in March 1919, publishing scion George Palmer Putnam and others, including Juliana Force-assistant to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney-incorporated the artist as "Rockwell Kent, Inc." to support him in his new Vermont homestead while he completed his paintings from Alaska for exhibition in 1920 at Knoedler Galleries in New York. Wilderness (1920), the first of Kent's several adventure memoirs, is an edited and illustrated compilation of his letters home. In the late summer of 1918, Kent and his nine-year-old son ventured to the American frontier of Alaska. It was as if we had never seen the mountains before." "And there, westward and heavenward, to the high ridge of Whiteface northward to the northern limit of the mountains, southward to their highest peaks, was spread the full half-circle panorama of the Adirondacks. "I don't want petty self-expression", Kent wrote, "I want the elemental, infinite thing I want to paint the rhythm of eternity." Asgaard Farm, Mountain Road, Jay, New York His series of land and seascapes from these often forbidding locales convey the Symbolist spirit evoking the mysteries and cosmic wonders of the natural world. Kent was away in Winona, Minnesota, on an architectural assignment when the historic Armory Show took place in Manhattan in 1913.Ī transcendentalist and mystic in the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, whose works he read, Kent found inspiration in the austerity and stark beauty of wilderness. Painters Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Max Weber (but not John Sloan, Robert Henri, or George Bellows) participated in the 1911 exhibition. Davies he organized An Independent Exhibition of the Paintings and Drawings of Twelve Men, referred to as "The Twelve" and "Kent's Tent". (It was Huneker who deemed the paintings of The Eight as "decidedly reactionary".) In 1910, Kent helped organize the Exhibition of Independent Artists, and in 1911, together with Arthur B. Among those critics lauding Kent was James Huneker of the Sun, who praised Kent's athletic brushwork and daring color dissonances. These works form the foundation of his lasting reputation as an early American modernist, and can be seen in museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His first series of paintings of Monhegan were shown to wide critical acclaim in 1907 at Clausen Galleries in New York. In 1905 Kent ventured to Monhegan Island, Maine, and found its rugged and primordial beauty a source of inspiration for the next five years. Kent's early paintings of Mount Monadnock and New Hampshire were first shown at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1904, when Dublin Pond was purchased by Smith College. At Columbia, Kent befriended future curator Carl Zigrosser, who became his close friend, supporter, and collaborator. An undergraduate background in architecture at Columbia University prepared Kent for occasional work in the 1900s and 1910s as an architectural renderer and carpenter. During the summer of 1903, in Dublin, New Hampshire, Kent was apprenticed to painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer. He studied composition and design with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League in the fall of 1900, and he studied painting with William Merritt Chase each of the three summers between 19 at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, after which he entered in the fall of 1902 Robert Henri's class at the New York School of Art, which Chase had founded. Kent studied with several influential painters and theorists of his day. He lived much of his early life in and around New York City, where he attended the Horace Mann School. Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York. Rockwell Kent (J– March 13, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, adventurer and voyager. Painting, printmaking, illustration, adventures
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