COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
COLUMNS
 

The Persuasive Eloquence
of Rockwell Kent

BARBARA J. NOVAK:

IN 1867, Henry T. Tuckcrnian wrote: "Adventure is an ele¬
ment in American artist-life which gives it singular zest and
interest." More than half a century later, Rockwell Kent
wrote: "I have always loved adventure ... I have stood in spots
where f have known that I was the iirst white man \^ ho had ever
seen that country, that I was the supreme consciousness that came
to it."

A^'ith his nineteenth century colleagues, Kent shared a love of
adventure not so much for its own sake, as for its philosophical
rewards. Adventure, as a route to knowing nature, was also a
route to possessing it, and receiving its moral benefits. Nineteenth
century moralism did not survive very well into the art of the
succeeding century, and was dutifully scuttled by modernism.
Yet, in Kent's art, writings, and philosophy, one senses a tough,
even ascetic moralism, which, though less sentimental than the
earlier brand, is no less genuine. Until the recent advent of earth
works and the ecological concern with the environment, it was
unusual in the twentieth century to find artists looking for ^vhat
Kent called "virginal lands." Yet his trips in the 1920's and '30's
to Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland were all part of a na¬
ture quest that recalls late i8th and 19th century researches into
the "sublimity" of wilderness.
 

3