Rockwell Kent

Man at Mast

1930

Rockwell Kent, 'Diver', wood engraving, 1931, edition 150, Burne Jones 88. Signed, and titled 'The Diver' in pencil. A brilliant, black impression, on cream, wove Japan paper; the fu...

Kent, Rockwell. HAIL AND FAREWELL. Burne-Jones 55. Wood engraving, 1930. Edition of 120. 8 x 5 1/2 inches, 203 x 140 mm. Signed in pencil. In excellent condition.

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) wood engraving in excellent condition titled: Diver. Created 1931. Edition size: 150. Image measures: 7 7/8"h x 5 3/8"w. The print is unframed and presents ...

Rockwell Kent "Hail and Farewell" 1930 Wood Engraving on Paper Signed in Pencil Lower Right Sheet Size: 14 3/8 x 11 1/4 in. Image Size: 8 x 5 1/2 in. Framed Size: 17.5 x 13.5 in. Growing up in a genteel family in New York City, Rockwell Kent was a member of the rugged realist school of landscape painters as well as a popular illustrator and printmaker. His 1930 illustrations for Moby Dick are among his most lasting achievements. He was the first American artist to have work exhibited in the Soviet Union, a reflection of his Communist Party sympathies, which earned him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. This espousal of radical politics caused his career to suffer badly in the '50s because his leftist views caused him disdain among many Americans. However, his work, reflecting both realism and modernism, has earned increasing attention from American art historians. His subject matter is wide-ranging including scenes of Maine's Monhegan Island, the Adirondack Mountains, book illustrations, and commercial art renderings for companies including General Electric, Rolls Royce, and Westinghouse. Although his first love was painting, in addition to illustration, he also did fabric, ceramic, and jewelry designs, and spent time as a dairy farmer, carpenter, home builder, and lobster fisherman...

Rockwell Kent, 'Sea and Sky', wood engraving, edition 150, 1931 (published 1932). A brilliant, richly-inked impression on cream wove Japan; the full sheet with margins (2 to 2 1/2 in...

Rockwell Kent, 'Mountain Climber', wood engraving, 1933, edition 250, Burne Jones 93. Signed in pencil. A brilliant, black impression, on cream, wove Japan paper; the full sheet with margins (2 9/16 to 3 5/8 inches); slight skinning at the top sheet edge verso, where previously hinged; otherwise, in excellent condition. Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 7 7/8 x 5 7/8 inches (200 x 149 mm); sheet size 14 x 11 1/8 inches (356 x 283 mm). Printed by Pynson Printers, New York. Distributed by The Print Club of Cleveland, Publication No. 11, 1933. Literature: 'Rockwellkentiana,' Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1933. '101 of The World’s Greatest Books', edited by Spencer Armstrong, 1950. Impressions of this work are held in the following museum collections: Akron Art Institute, Burne Jones Collection, IL; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; H. M. de Young Museum; Hermitage Museum; Kent Collection, NY; Library of Congress; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester; Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Princeton University Library; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Spector Collection, NY; SUNY, Plattsburg. ABOUT THE ARTIST Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), though best known as a painter, graphic artist, and illustrator, pursued many careers throughout his life, including architect, carpenter, explorer, writer, dairy farmer, and political activist. Born in Tarrytown, New York, Kent was interested in art from a young age. These ambitions were encouraged by his aunt Jo Holgate, an accomplished ceramicist. Jo came to live with the family after Kent’s father passed away in 1887 and took him to Europe as a teenager, undoubtedly kindling his interest in exploring the world. Kent attended the Horace Mann School in New York City, where he excelled at mechanical drawing. His family’s financial circumstances prevented him from pursuing a career in the fine arts; however, after graduating from Horace Mann in 1900, Kent decided to study architecture at Columbia University. Before matriculating at Columbia, Kent spent the first of three consecutive summers studying painting at William Merritt Chase’s art school in Shinnecock Hills, Long Island. There he found a community of mentors and fellow students who encouraged him to pursue his interest in art. At the end of Kent’s third summer at Shinnecock, Chase offered him a full scholarship to the New York School of Art, where he was a teacher. Kent began taking night classes at the art school in addition to his architecture studies but soon left Columbia to study painting full-time. In addition to Chase, Kent took classes with Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, where his classmates included the artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Kent spent the summer of 1903 assisting the eccentric painter Abbott Handerson Thayer at his studio in Dublin, New Hampshire—a position he secured through the recommendation of his Aunt Jo. Thayer’s naturalist lifestyle and almost mystical appreciation for natural phenomena greatly influenced Kent; he returned to Dublin for many years to visit Thayer and his family. Thayer gave the young artist time to pursue his work, and that summer Kent painted several views of the New Hampshire landscape, including Mount Monadnock. In 1905 Kent moved from New York to Monhegan Island in Maine, home to a summer art colony, where he continued to find inspiration in nature. Kent soon found success exhibiting and selling his paintings in New York, and in 1907, he was given his first solo show at Claussen Galleries. The following year he married his first wife, Kathleen Whiting (Thayer’s niece), with whom he had five children. The couple divorced in 1924, and Kent married Frances Lee the following year. They divorced after 15 years of marriage, and the artist married Sally Johnstone. For the next several decades, Kent lived a peripatetic lifestyle, settling in several locations in Connecticut, Maine, and New York. During this time he took several extended voyages to remote, often ice-filled, corners of the globe, including Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland, to which he made three separate trips. For Kent, exploration and artistic production were twinned endeavors, and his travels to these rugged, elemental locations inspired his visual art and his writings. He developed a stark, realist landscape style in his paintings and drawings that revealed both nature’s harshness and its sublimity. Kent’s human figures, which appear sparingly in his work, often allude to the mythic themes of isolation, individualism, heroism, and the quest for self-connection. Important exhibitions of works from these travels include the Knoedler Gallery’s shows in 1919 and 1920, featuring Kent’s Alaska drawings...

Rockwell Kent, 'The Bather', wood engraving, 1931, edition 120, Burne Jones 63. Signed in pencil. A brilliant, black impression, on cream, wove Japan paper; the full sheet with margins (2 1/2 to 3 1/4 inches); slight skinning at the top sheet edge, verso, otherwise in excellent condition. Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 5 3/8 x 7 7/8 inches (137 x 200 mm); sheet size 11 1/8 x 14 1/2 inches (283 x 368 mm). Impressions of this work are held in the following public collections: Burne Jones Collection (Illinois), Chazen Museum of Art, Chegodaev Collection (Moscow), Kent Collection (New York), National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art; SUNY Plattsburg Art Museum, Princeton University Library, Pushkin Museum (Moscow), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Spector Collection (New York), University of Illinois. ABOUT THE ARTIST Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), though best known as a painter, graphic artist, and illustrator, pursued many careers throughout his life, including architect, carpenter, explorer, writer, dairy farmer, and political activist. Born in Tarrytown, New York, Kent was interested in art from a young age. These ambitions were encouraged by his aunt Jo Holgate, an accomplished ceramicist. Jo came to live with the family after Kent’s father passed away in 1887 and took him to Europe as a teenager, undoubtedly kindling his interest in exploring the world. Kent attended the Horace Mann School in New York City, where he excelled at mechanical drawing. His family’s financial circumstances prevented him from pursuing a career in the fine arts; however, after graduating from Horace Mann in 1900, Kent decided to study architecture at Columbia University. Before matriculating at Columbia, Kent spent the first of three consecutive summers studying painting at William Merritt Chase’s art school in Shinnecock Hills, Long Island. There he found a community of mentors and fellow students who encouraged him to pursue his interest in art. At the end of Kent’s third summer at Shinnecock, Chase offered him a full scholarship to the New York School of Art, where he was a teacher. Kent began taking night classes at the art school in addition to his architecture studies but soon left Columbia to study painting full-time. In addition to Chase, Kent took classes with Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, where his classmates included the artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Kent spent the summer of 1903 assisting the eccentric painter Abbott Handerson Thayer at his studio in Dublin, New Hampshire—a position he secured through the recommendation of his Aunt Jo. Thayer’s naturalist lifestyle and almost mystical appreciation for natural phenomena greatly influenced Kent; he returned to Dublin for many years to visit Thayer and his family. Thayer gave the young artist time to pursue his work, and that summer Kent painted several views of the New Hampshire landscape, including Mount Monadnock...

A handsome 1930s Rockwell Kent lithograph on paper, titled "Canterbury Tales". Nicely matted and framed in a gold-toned frame. Image size: ...

Thomas Maitland Cleland by Rockwell Kent, American (1882–1971) Date: 1929 Lithograph, signed in pencil Image Size: 9.5 x 7 inches Size: 12 x 10 in. (30.48 x 25.4 cm)

Elizabeth Catlett “Man” 1975 (The Print Club of Cleveland Publication Number 83, 2005) Woodcut and Color Linocut Printed in 2003 at JK Fine Art Editions Co., Union City, New Jersey Signed and Dated By The Artist Lower Right Titled Lower Left Ed. of 250 Image Size: approx 18 x 12 inches Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) is regarded as one of the most important women artists and African American artists of our time. She believed art could affect social change and that she should be an agent for that change: “I have always wanted my art to service black people—to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.” As an artist and an activist, Catlett highlighted the dignity and courage of motherhood, poverty, and the working class, returning again and again to the subject she understood best—African American women. The work below, entitled, “Man”, is "carved from a block of wood, chiseled like a relief. Catlett, a sculptor as well as a printmaker, carves figures out of wood, and so is extremely familiar with this material. For ‘Man’ she exploits the grain of the wood, allowing to to describe the texture of the skin and form vertical striations, almost scarring the image. Below this intense, three-dimensional visage parades seven boys, printed repetitively from a single linoleum block in a “rainbow roll” that changes from gold to brown. This row of brightly colored figures with bare feet, flat like a string of paper dolls, raise their arms toward the powerful depiction of the troubled man above.” Biography: Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) Known for abstract sculpture in bronze and marble as well as prints and paintings, particularly depicting the female figure, Elizabeth Catlett is unique for distilling African American, Native American, and Mexican art in her work. She is "considered by many to be the greatest American black sculptor". . .(Rubinstein 320) Catlett was born in Washington D.C. and later became a Mexican citizen, residing in Cuernavaca Morelos, Mexico. She spent the last 35 years of her life in Mexico. Her father, a math teacher at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, died before she was born, but the family, including her working mother, lived in the relatively commodious home of his family in DC. Catlett received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University, where there was much discussion about whether or not black artists should depict their own heritage or embrace European modernism. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1940 from the University of Iowa, where she had gone to study with Grant Wood, Regionalist* painter. His teaching dictum was "paint what you know best," and this advice set her on the path of dealing with her own background. She credits Wood with excellent teaching and deep concern for his students, but she had a problem during that time of taking classes from him because black students were not allowed housing in the University's dormitories. Following graduation in 1940, she became Chair of the Art Department at Dillard University in New Orleans. There she successfully lobbied for life classes with nude models, and gained museum admission to black students at a local museum that to that point, had banned their entrance. That same year, her painting Mother and Child, depicting African-American figures won her much recognition. From 1944 to 1946, she taught at the George Washington Carver School, an alternative community school in Harlem that provided instruction for working men and women of the city. From her experiences with these people, she did a series of paintings, prints, and sculptures with the theme "I Am a Negro Woman." In 1946, she received a Rosenwald Fellowship*, and she and her artist husband, Charles White, traveled to Mexico where she became interested in the Mexican working classes. In 1947, she settled permanently in Mexico where she, divorced from White, married artist Francisco Mora...