LOOKING FOR CLUES IN NATURE BUT NOT ALWAYS FINDING THEM

ROCKWELL KENT: THE MYTHIC AND THE MODERN
On view at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine
From June 23 to October 16, 2005

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves

“[W]hat humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds, but the re-creation, in terms of human comprehension, of the world we have, and it is to this task that all the arts are committed.”
—Archibald MacLeish, A Continuing Journey

Living in Maine, I thought I knew Rockwell Kent’s work nearly as well as, say, Andrew Wyeth’s. While neither man is technically a Maine artist—both are “from away”—Kent and Wyeth adopted Maine long enough to paint it and give the state some of the reflected glory that came with their fame. With Wyeth it was midcoast Maine, and with Kent it was Monhegan Island. Both artists’ paintings have found their way into many of Maine’s art museums, and their work has come to seem like old chestnuts—reliable and good enough, but not exactly surprising. Usually, I hurry by them and think, “Oh, yes, there’s one of Wyeth’s muted landscapes” or “Didn’t Kent paint shimmering skies?”

An exhibition, Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern, at the Portland Museum of Art, has certainly disabused me of the notion that I “knew” Rockwell Kent. This rich, absorbing exhibit, shown on two floors, reveals the many sides of Kent, not all of them flattering, and it illustrates aspects of the artist of which I had been unaware. Little did I know that Kent had designed dinnerware featuring his housekeeper in Greenland. Or that he had illustrated Moby- Dick and Paul Bunyan. Or that he formed a corporation that sold shares and was designed to “support Kent” during the early 1900s. I came away thinking that Kent was equal parts huckster, irritating visionary, and true artist.

Where to start in describing the work of this uneven, protean artist? Perhaps with his early work, where the exhibit begins as it features a few somber landscapes. In particular, A New England Landscape (1903), with its dark trees, dark field, and everything in shadow, looks as though it were painted by a member of clan Wyeth.

But then in 1905, Kent moved to Monhegan Island, where it seems he was struck by the light, and he stayed there for five years. As one of the wall plaques diplomatically puts it, on Monhegan Kent “energized his palette.” Indeed he did, and this energy suffused his paintings with a luminosity that makes the landscapes feel transcendent. His early Monhegan paintings have an undeveloped look, but they are nonetheless brought to life with the glow of color, whether it is the deep blue sea, the setting sun, or the snow. They all look as though they are lit from within, and they radiate life and vitality. This quality stayed with him, albeit in fits and starts, as he matured as an artist and turned his attention from Monhegan to such remote places as Greenland and Alaska. I would argue that it is his landscapes, with their luminous but controlled energy, that give him the much-deserved reputation of being a first-rate artist.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said when he strayed from landscapes and “delved into fundamental questions of the human condition—suffering, death, and the hereafter.” These paintings are dull, clunky, heavy-handed, and oh-so-earnest. People, done in great globs, strike various dramatic or pathetic poses, and the drawings and prints are no better. “Kent moved away from naturalism by elevating intuition and emotion over reason and observation.” Clearly, his work suffered. Without reason and observation as steadying forces, intuition and emotion all too often encourage the ego to run amok, and the results, as seen in this exhibit, can be embarrassingly bad.

It is a well-known if little acknowledged fact that artists, even those whose egos run amok, must pay bills and eat. Kent did this in a number of ways—some of which I mentioned above. Additionally, he did ad work that was so overwrought and over-the-top that all I could do was shake my head. However, there are some snappy examples of graphics that he did for such magazines as Harper’s Weekly, Puck, and Vanity Fair. Kent used the alias “Hogarth, Jr. to protect his name.” These supple and sly ink drawings do not suffer from an excess of earnestness, or, conversely, from hucksterism, and, with the stylized look of the early 1900s, they capture snippets of life in the Jazz Age.

Equally fine but darker in mood are the illustrations he did for Moby-Dick. These woodcuts really do capture the tone of the novel. The exception to this is Night and Stars (or Moby Rises). In this illustration a happy, almost ecstatic, Moby-Dick leaps out of the ocean into a starry night. I couldn’t help but think that an appropriate caption might be, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

The artist Gabriel Orozco once said, “The poetic happens when you don’t have expectations.” Or, in other words, preconceived notions, and this concept applies to other things as well. I thought of Orozco’s words as I went through this exhibition of Kent’s work, which I was sure I knew. In fact, I didn’t know his work at all. In the future, I will try to follow Orozco’s advice and leave my expectations behind when I go to an art exhibit or read a book or see a play.  

 

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