Happy Birthday, Rockwell Kent

June 21, 2006 8:56 PM

Printmaker. Painter. Adventurer. Advertiser. One of the most popular graphic artists of the 20th century, he created the Random House logo for his pals Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer and illustrated their first book. His illustrations for another, Moby Dick, are widely credited with resurrecting that novel for modern audiences. His own first book was favorably compared to Whitman's Leaves of Grass and for a time his bookplates were everywhere, but he "virtually vanished from the museum and gallery circuits by the late 1940s" due to his outspoken support for Stalinism. When the State Department refused to grant him a passport because of his political views, he took his case to the Supreme Court and won, establishing that the right to travel cannot be denied to American citizens. Happy birthday, Rockwell Kent.
posted by mediareport (16 comments total)

Hmm, that first link worked a second ago. Try this one, which just worked for me.
posted by mediareport at 9:04 PM on June 21, 2006

I'm of the opinion that there is a finite amount of talent from which all humans draw. People like this use more than their fair share. /fake rant

Good stuff here.
posted by pmbuko at 9:12 PM on June 21, 2006

I wonder if he liked the Stalinists for their great graphic design resources?
posted by anthill at 9:19 PM on June 21, 2006

Can someone who knows about these things explain to me why so many artists in the 40's and 50's were Stalinists? I understand their attraction of the communist ideal, but Stalin? Wasn't it obvious even then that he was a pretty unpleasant person?
posted by Pastabagel at 9:23 PM on June 21, 2006

Ahhhh, the good old right to travel. The gov't can't keep our soccer hooligans from going to the World Cup.
posted by smackfu at 9:24 PM on June 21, 2006

Ahhhh, the good old right to travel. The gov't can't keep our soccer hooligans from going to the World Cup.

We have soccer hooligans?
posted by delmoi at 9:28 PM on June 21, 2006

I understand their attraction of the communist ideal, but Stalin?

What makes Kent's story so weird to me is that he kept on supporting Stalin long after most other folks on the left had realized the repressive horror in the Soviet Union. The "virtually vanished" link gives a few details:

He had been a participant in the hearings of the World Congress for Peace, and in 1960 he gave the then Soviet Union hundreds of his paintings, drawings, prints, books and ephemera as a gesture of friendship. A predictable result of this second event was a scornful reception unparalleled since Kent's scuffle with Joseph McCarthy 14 years earlier.

It may help to know that Kent was by most accounts I've seen a stubborn guy; there's a recent play about his life in Newfoundland during WWI, when he deliberately antagonized his Canadian neighbors by doing everything he could to encourage the rumor that he was a German spy. Why would anyone do that?

Honestly, I think he was just kind of a punk at heart.
posted by mediareport at 9:41 PM on June 21, 2006

Great stuff, thanks. I've always enjoyed his art, especially Moby Dick. I Googled in vain for the illustration that is the counterpoint to this one. The one I was looking for shows the whale diving into the water, and he is sucking the stars down into the ocean with him. It does a great job of conveying the unreal power of Moby Dick.
posted by marxchivist at 10:16 PM on June 21, 2006

awesome post! Thanks.
posted by shoepal at 12:05 AM on June 22, 2006

26 Kent paintings at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, Russia. (And while you are there, check out the rest of The Hermitage site.... its wonderful.)
posted by R. Mutt at 6:04 AM on June 22, 2006

Thank you, R. Mutt! I *knew* I'd forgotten something important and the Hermitage collection includes some of his best landscapes. The semi-abstract compositions, the colors, the scale...brilliant stuff there.
posted by mediareport at 6:22 AM on June 22, 2006

I've enjoyed both his Moby Dick prints, and an oil painting from his time in Newfoundland that was strikingly different from other contemporaneous American art I've seen.
posted by bullitt 5 at 6:56 AM on June 22, 2006

I went to Plattsburgh State University which had a large collection of his works. Site here.
posted by dr_dank at 7:06 AM on June 22, 2006

Guess the Hermitage site painting links are temporary or something - it was paintings 8, 6 and 22, for those following at home - my faves from that collection. (And dr_dank, the 2nd link in the post is to the Plattsburgh State collection.)
posted by mediareport at 7:18 AM on June 22, 2006

mediareport, The USSR was a stalinist communist country until it stopped being communist in 1991.
posted by JJ86 at 8:17 AM on June 22, 2006

mediareport, What a spectacular post. Wow, truly an exceptional and wonderful collection. I knew nothing about Rockwell Kent. His work is astounding, beautiful, heart-lifting. Thank you for this gift, what treasure.

These are some of the most beautiful paintings I've ever seen.

Like so many other superb artists, his character was a complex tangle of traits.

As a child I had those classic Ex Libris book plates, no idea they were Rockwell Kent images. His images for Moby Dick were too stark for me to have liked as a child but now I see his black and white work, it is breathtaking, visual zen in light and dark.

There is something industrial in the proportions, like Nicholas Roerich's work, angular and icon-like, the chunky muscle and deco squareness, a lean stockiness that is so typical of Russian art then. And they had a similar work of the night sky in the mountains.

It's so bizarre that Kent was a Stalin devotee.

Ezra Pound was "an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, and anti-Semitic sentiments begin to appear in his writings." Could it be something cerebral narcissists do, go gaga over another super-narcissist of a malignant variety?

I wonder if there were other narcissistic artist/writers of great accomplishment who were attracted to other Darth Vaders?

I'm looking forward to reading Rockwell Kent's writing.

Fun to see what's for sale of his on AbeBooks.
posted by nickyskye at 3:57 PM on June 23, 2006