25 Facts About Rockwell Kent

Rockwell Kent was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, adventurer and voyager.

Rockwell Kent lived much of his early life in and around New York City, where he attended the Horace Mann School.

Rockwell Kent studied composition and design with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League in the fall of 1900, and he studied painting with William Merritt Chase each of the three summers between 1900 and 1902 at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, after which he entered in the fall of 1902 Robert Henri's class at the New York School of Art, which Chase had founded.

At Columbia, Rockwell Kent befriended future curator Carl Zigrosser, who became his close friend, supporter, and collaborator.

In 1905 Rockwell Kent ventured to Monhegan Island, Maine, and found its rugged and primordial beauty a source of inspiration for the next five years.

Rockwell Kent was away in Winona, Minnesota, on an architectural assignment when the historic Armory Show took place in Manhattan in 1913.

Wilderness, the first of Rockwell Kent's several adventure memoirs, is an edited and illustrated compilation of his letters home.

Rockwell Kent frequently crossed into the realm of illustration in the 1920s and contributed drawings for reproduction on the covers of many leading magazines.

At the Art Students League in the 1920s or 1930s, Rockwell Kent met and befriended many artists, including Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and Thomas Furlong.

Ostensibly staying away from the state of Massachusetts to protest the Sacco and Vanzetti executions of 1927, Rockwell Kent did in fact venture to Dennis in June 1930 to spend three days on the scaffolding, making suggestions and corrections.

In 1927, Rockwell Kent moved to upstate New York where he had acquired an Adirondack farmstead.

Rockwell Kent spent two years above the Arctic Circle in a tiny fishing settlement called Igdlorssuit, where he conceived some of the largest and most celebrated paintings of his career.

Rockwell Kent included a polemical statement in the painting, apparently a message from the indigenous people of Alaska to the Puerto Ricans, in support of decolonization.

In 1948, Rockwell Kent was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and in 1966 he became a full Academician.

Rockwell Kent passed away at his home in the Adirondacks in 1971.

Rockwell Kent cast his first presidential vote for Eugene Debs that year, and for the rest of his life was ready to debate socialist ideas on any occasion.

Rockwell Kent briefly joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1912 and belonged at various times to unions in the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Rockwell Kent was not a Communist and considered his political views to be in the best traditions of American democracy.

Meanwhile, Rockwell Kent came under attack as an officer of the International Workers Order, a mutual benefit and cultural society supported by leftists and immigrants.

In 1951, Rockwell Kent defended his record in court proceedings and exposed the perjured testimony that claimed he was a Communist.

From 1957 to 1971, Rockwell Kent was president of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

Rockwell Kent subsequently became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts and in 1967 the recipient of the International Lenin Peace Prize.

Rockwell Kent specified that his prize money be given to the women and children of Vietnam, both North and South.

Rockwell Kent traveled to the Soviet Union and found like-minded people there.

Rockwell Kent was a prolific writer whose adventure memoirs and autobiographies include:.