Rockwell Kent's Distant Shores: The Story of an Exhibition

Abstract

... Painter, printmaker, illustrator, and architect; a designer of books, ceramics, and textiles, and a prolific writer, [Rockwell Kent] was complex and self-contradictory. ... His major art was inspired by his extended sojourns in remote, sparsely inhabited, and climatically harsh regions, most of them islands, .... In the summer of 1905, when he was 23, he first went to Monhegan, an isolated island 10 miles off the coast of Maine, ..... 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 [Constance Martin] as the guest curator. ... After five years of research and travel, I had tracked down over 100 works from private and public collections in many areas of the United States as far away as Alaska, as well as in eastern and western Canada and Russia. Distant Shores opened in June of 2000 and traveled from New England to Ocala, Florida, Chicago, and Anchorage. The most complicated negotiations involved the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Senator Joseph McCarthy, in an attempt to label Kent a Communist, took away his passport and ordered all his illustrated books in overseas government libraries removed and burned .... In retaliation, Kent gave the Soviet Union a major selection of his paintings, watercolours, and drawings in the 1960s. ... With the support and foresight of the Norman Rockwell Museum, I was able to visit the Hermitage collection and make a groundbreaking arrangement for the inclusion of seven Greenland and Tierra del Fuego paintings. ... Kent's artistic imagination was both visual and literary. ... His early reading of Icelandic sagas and his study of the exploration narratives of the various searches for the Northwest Passage provided Kent with the stimulus to experience for himself "...the Far North at its spectacular worst" .... The power of his illustrations for Moby Dick comes from both his incisive literary perception of Melville's great novel and his own firsthand encounters with the polar seas. Distant Shores was an exhibition designed to show the art that Kent created in paintings, engravings, and books out of his response to the Far North, the polar seas, and the wilderness that he himself confronted. ...