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Article Excerpt
ROCKWELL KENT'S (1882-1971) title for his 617-page autobiography, It's Me, O Lord (1955) is from a spiritual:
It's me, it's me, it's me, O Lord,
Standin' in the need of prayer
It suggests a sense of humility rarely if ever evident in Kent's typically egocentric conduct and grandiloquent published prose.
What is certain is that he was an artist of extraordinary drive, talent, and versatility, who embraced life with exuberance. Painter, printmaker, illustrator, and architect; a designer of books, ceramics, and textiles, and a prolific writer, he was complex and self-contradictory. He loved the wilderness, but enjoyed and moved easily in urban society. Three times married (and sexually promiscuous), he had five legitimate children by his first wife and one by a mistress. He was deeply spiritual, but indifferent to the dogmas of established religions: an anti-authoritarian individualist and a lifelong socialist. Uncowed, but furious, when Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of being a Communist sympathizer, he conducted his life by his own light.
More perhaps than anything else, he was a modern Ulysses, romantic at times and ruthless at others. His major art was inspired by his extended sojourns in remote, sparsely inhabited, and climatically harsh regions, most of them islands, to which his imagination may well have been drawn by their mythic association with the mystical and the marvelous (Polk, 1991). It seemed to him, too, that their remoteness from the world of cities and commerce would allow him to be as he wished and to discover his own artistic vision. He wrote, with typical grandiloquence,
The wilderness is kindled into life by man's beholding of it; he is its consciousness, his coming is its dawn. Surely the passion of his first discovery carries the warmth and the caress of a sunrise on the chaos of creation. (Kent, 1924:24)
In the summer of 1905, when he was 23, he first went to Monhegan, an isolated island 10 miles off the coast of Maine, which had a summer art colony and a small population of resident fishermen. He was to return for extended visits many times in his life. From 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, until 1915, he and his wife, Kathleen, with their children, lived on the Island of Newfoundland. Then, in 1918, with his nine-year-old son, he spent eight months on Fox Island, Alaska, 12 miles off the coast from Seward, the nearest mainland town. In 1922, he sailed to the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, hoping to sail from there around Cape Horn. The final stage in his odyssey took him to Greenland, first in 1929, and again in 1931 and 1934-35, where he lived on the tiny island of Igdlorssuit.
Kent's travels to these far-flung regions, which were in large part journeys of self-discovery, inspired much of his finest work and provided the chronological and geographical structure for the exhibition, Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent. The show was organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts, with me as a guest curator.
My involvement in Distant Shores came about through a series of coincidental connections and surprises. A visit in the summer of 1995 to the museum brought to my mind the stunning power of Norman Rockwell's semi-namesake and fellow illustrator, Rockwell Kent, best known for his illustrations of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the 19th-century whaling saga set in the polar seas. My thoughts turned to Kent's depiction of icebergs and high seas as an antidote to a hot summer day. This led to a discussion with the museum's director about a possible exhibition of Kent's art. Soon we were both filled with the kind of enthusiasm that happens only when the pieces of a puzzle fit perfectly. Melville's house, where he created the American classic, was only a few miles away. Kent, like his contemporary Norman Rockwell, had lived in the area. He had married into a local family and painted many paintings of the surrounding country. Once I perceived...
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