Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent ranks as one of America’s most diverse and multi-talented artists. He was not only a painter, printmaker, illustrator, photographer, filmmaker, designer, and architect but an intrepid traveler, a writer and lecturer, and a political activist. A contentious idealist whose leftist political convictions often derailed his commercial success, Kent believed that embracing life was more important than creating art, and that one’s art should reflect actual experience. He rejected modernism’s focus on the artist’s inner life and worked in a style he described as “romantic realism” to make his work accessible to the widest possible audience.

Raised in genteel poverty in suburban New York City, Kent trained as an architect but studied painting with the leading teachers in the New York art world. His early visits to Maine’s Monhegan Island, during which he supported himself by manual labor, set the tone for a life of roughing it in remote and harsh locales. In addition to the Maine coast and New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, Kent sojourned in Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland, places that offered “the spirit-stirring glamour of the terrible” and material for his art and numerous illustrated writings; he also illustrated editions of such heroic sagas as Moby-Dick (1930) and Beowulf (1932). Kent was so prolific, versatile, and energetic that a friend characterized him as “not a person at all, but an Organization.” By the early 1930s, Kent was an American celebrity both for his art and for his much-promoted travels, but he was also infamous for his outspoken championing of socialist ideals. Kent eventually gave a large number of his works to the Soviet Union.