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64

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ROCKWELL KENT (1882-1971) The Settlement, 19...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:200,000.00 - 300,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ROCKWELL KENT (1882-1971) The Settlement, 19...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
ROCKWELL KENT
(1882-1971)
The Settlement, 1935-37
signed and dated "Rockwell Kent 1935-7" (lower left)
oil on canvas
34 1/4 x 44 1/4 in. (86.4 x 113 cm) <p>Estimate: $200,000-300,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection Hirschl & Adler Gallery, New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, 1981 <p> Exhibited
San Francisco, John Bergguen Gallery, American Painting, August 1980 New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery, American Masters of the Twentieth Century, January-February 1981 <p> Literature
Mary Stofflet, "Hit Parade of American Painting," Artweek, II, August 30, 1980, p. 5 (illustrated) Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Twentieth Century American Painting, London, 1987, p. 60, no. 12 (illustrated, p. 61) <p> This painting has been requested for the exhibition Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern which is scheduled for the summer of 2004 at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. <p> Rockwell Kent was an American of great talents - painter, printmaker, illustrator, architectural draftsman, explorer, author, and political activist. He was a man of intense passions and deeply felt beliefs. In 1932, the critic Henry McBride noted that "the only American artist that I can think of who sallies forth conqueringly into drawing room or wilderness is Rockwell Kent." Kent was equally at home in the artistic milieu of New York, among the fishermen of Monhegan Island, or the inhabitants of Arctic Greenland, and on the Alaskan frontier. He was sympathetic to both the ardent discursive politics of intellectuals and the practical socialism of workers. <p> Kent was a consummate explorer. Never patient enough to put down roots in one place for long, he traveled frequently and over the course of his life. He subjected himself to some of the coldest and most remote environments on earth; moving to Maine, Newfoundland, and Alaska; voyaging in small boats to Tierra del Fuego and Greenland. Kent's paintings and prints often portray the bleak and rugged aspects of nature, a reflection both of his life in these harsh climates and of his intense respect for those toiling under nature's most brutal conditions. <p> Kent often did not paint his scenes directly from nature, but rather carefully researched natural forms - mountains, lakes, the changing skies - in different parts of the world and integrated them into his compositions. Kent painted The Settlement during the period of 1935-1937, after two extended visits to Greenland and one trip to Nome, Alaska, in the early 1930s. It is likely that in The Settlement, he incorporated aspects of both locales. Though Kent favored vast, uncomplicated compositions - like the arctic land he was depicting - he nonetheless filled his paintings with minute detail. Here, Eskimos are depicted in the foreground while further back, dogs scamper across the edge of a frozen lake and animal skins dry on racks in the mid-day sun. The far edge of the lake is delineated by a sharp, tan stripe that runs across the entire canvas while the main feature of the painting, the craggy, ominous mountains, appear to stand watch over the scene. <p> Kent was keenly aware of nature's force and felt that mountains, perhaps more than any other natural form, symbolized nature's quiet but persistent force. Stark, hulking mountains hover quietly over many of Kent's arctic scenes. Ever present in his travels, Kent once said of mountains, "they were there where I lived and surrounding me wherever I might go, such magnificence of beauty as I had never dreamed could be." <p>We are grateful to Beth Venn for cataloguing this lot.
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