Rockwell Kent: Visionary Works from Greenland
Tequesta, FL (February 15, 2008) “Rockwell Kent: Visionary Works from Greenland"
opens for four weeks on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at the Lighthouse Center for the
Arts. The first American exhibition in generations devoted entirely to Kent’s achievements
in Greenland, the show is curated by independent curator and historian Jake Milgram
Wien and focuses on Kent’s visionary explorations of what lies beyond the known
and familiar.
Comprised of more than 30 of the artist’s paintings, watercolors, drawings, and
prints, the exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary moment
in cultural cooperation. In 1957 and 1958 the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage
Museum in St. Petersburg hosted a retrospective of Kent's landscape paintings from
remote outposts of the Western hemisphere, attracting thousands of Russian visitors.
An early proponent of Soviet-American friendship throughout the Cold War era,
Kent believed in the power of art and the universality of beauty as allies of transnational
goodwill and peace.
Kent sailed to Greenland at the height of his career in the summer
of 1929, when several of his American contemporaries including modernists Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley went west to Santa Fe.
He returned to Greenland in the summers
of 1931 and 1934, each time sojourning through the long Arctic winter to paint and
write.
In Greenland Kent reached artistic maturity by innovatively responding to
the formal poetics of landscape, particularly the seasonal changes in light as played
out on a vast immutable terrain. The
artist’s early studies with painters William
Merritt Chase and Abbott Thayer solidified his devotion to the natural world, but
his lesser-known study with Arthur Wesley Dow also deserves recognition. At
the turn of the twentieth century, Dow advocated everything Japanese and his teaching
of Japanese composition shaped the way in which Kent reductively approached his
landscape designs.
Among the exhibition’s highlights are several of Kent’s
rarely
seen watercolor portraits of Greenlanders as well as iconic pen-and-ink drawings
of Ahab and the white whale published in the critically acclaimed 1930 edition of
Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick.
Kent completed his drawings for Moby Dick between his first two voyages to Greenland.
Kent’s works from Greenland figure prominently on a continuum
that extends back to the exotic, cosmic tales of Melville and forward to the energized
narratives of Jack Kerouac.
Kent wrote an influential adventure memoir about his
harrowing first voyage to Greenland—the
bestselling N by E (1930) -- which
was one of many contributions he made to popular culture as a writer and illustrator.
His generation’s quintessential follower of the open road, Kent engaged in many
expeditions to remote places in the Western Hemisphere.
His paintings from Monhegan
Island, Maine; Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Ireland foreshadow the
powerful and often spare landscapes from Greenland.
“Rockwell Kent: Visionary Works from Greenland” and its accompanying
full-color illustrated brochure are made possible through the generous support of
Kathryn W. Davis. Open to
the public on March 4. Lighthouse Center for the Arts, located at 373 Tequesta
Drive, Tequesta, FL, is open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m. – 4:30 pm.
For more information call 561-746-3101.
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