Rockwell Kent at the Fleming: Art into hands of many, rather than the few – Rutland Herald

A solitary figure stands on his boats bowsprit, right hand on the forestay, his chiseled torso light against the dark sky. His left arm and posture reach forward where a distant hill and small village emerge above the waves under a crescent of clear sky. Rockwell Kents Home Port, (1931) wood engraving on maple printed by Elmer Adler, is from a series of 12 essential Kent prints used in a national advertising campaign for luxury yachts.

Across the Fleming Museum gallery from Home Port, on the cover of a pamphlet, a woman cradles a baby in one arm and holds the hand of a little girl as two more children clutch her skirt. Strength, dignity and hardship are evident.

This pamphlet holds the transcript of a public hearing in West Rutland, on the strike of the Vermont Marble Company workers, Feb. 29, 1936. Kent supported the strikers cause and assisted with aid for their families, in person and with his artwork.

Rockwell Kent: Prints from the Ralf C. Nemec Collection opened last month at the University of Vermonts Fleming Museum of Art in Burlington. Nemecs collection is the largest assemblage of Kents print work the exhibition includes 49 selections from it, from his first wood engraving print in 1919 through the 1940s.

The exhibition also features Kent-related works from the Flemings collections and the University of Vermonts Special Collections Rare Books, including books illustrated by Kent, Works Progress Administration instructive panels on printmaking techniques, and selections by Kents Vermont peers including Ronald Slayton and Anne Squire.

Upstairs at the Fleming is Shanta Lee Ganders multi-part exhibition Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine. Ganders large-scale photographs, co-created with her models and accompanied by their words, overturns the traditional relationship of photographer and subject. In its extension Object-Defied, the artist reexamines objects in the Flemings collection through the gaze of the sacred feminine.

The Flemings Wolcott Gallery features Call and Response, a debut collaboration with the Howard Center Arts Collective. Exhibiting artists selected artwork from the Flemings collection, pieces of personal interest to them, then created original works. Among the participating artists, Jacob Weber considers the first director of the Fleming Museum in Shattered Fragility: A Portrait of Henry F. Perkins, inspired by Arshile Gorkys 1939 Head of Margulies. Besides his role at the Fleming, Perkins was a Eugenics advocate and promoted Eugenics legislation.

The Montier Portraits, the fourth special exhibit, features a rare pair of 1841 oil paintings of an African-American couple. Hiram Charles Montier, a Philadelphia bootmaker, Elizabeth Brown Montier, his wife are each painted in a formal setting. The portraits are on loan from the family of the late William Pickens III. Pickens served as first African American president of the UVM Student Association in 1957-58.

These exhibitions continue to Dec. 9. The Fleming is presenting extensive events and programs relating to the exhibits, with information at http://www.flemingmuseum.org online.

Artist, illustrator, adventurer, architectural draughtsman, author, dairy farmer, and more Kent, born in 1882, was already a well-established artist when he cut his first wood engraving, Bluebird in 1919. He was in Alaska for an extended stay with his son, a time recounted in his enthusiastically received 1920 memoir Wilderness. A friend had sent wood-carving supplies with Kent.

Engraving and printmaking opened another realm for Kent and his exploration of it soon took off.

Kent believed that printmaking was inherently democratic, said Alice Boone, Fleming Museum curator of education and public programs, noting that part of the appeal of printmaking to Kent was bringing art into hands of many, rather than the few who could afford paintings.

Kents work reached viewers in myriad ways, including in editions of numbered and signed prints and images including Home Port that were reproduced in advertising and posters. He illustrated editions of many classics, Moby Dick among them, although these were often with his drawings. For the epic Beowulf, he created lithographs Nemecs set is in the exhibition. Kents Christmas cards and book plates also reached wide audiences.

Kents mastery of shadow and light pervades in his woodcut engravings. His fine lines and sharp definition heighten the black-and-white contrast, with magnificent, often heroic figures emerging from the fields of black ink.

The Fleming exhibition spans three decades of Kents prints.

From 1919 into the 1920s, Kent spent extended solitary time in remote lands Alaska, Newfoundland, Tierra del Fuego and his works speak to solitude, the wilderness and mystical connections.

In the 1930s viewers see Kents attention to daily life of the Adirondacks, where he had his Asgaard Farm in Au Sable Forks his home for the rest of his life and also of life in Greenland, where he spent two years in a fishing village above the Arctic Circle.

Kents deep social consciousness shows in the third stage of his printmaking, late 1930s through 1940s. He belonged to several unions and supported aid groups. He advocated nuclear disarmament and better relations with the Soviet Union, views that later landed him in front of Joseph McCarthys House Un-American Activities Committee.

Nemec began collecting Kents work in the mid 1980s only a portion of his vast collection is in this exhibition.

They just spoke to me. Rockwell became a force of his own, said Nemec, noting that people who already know the artist will love seeing this breadth of his work.

Those who dont know Kent, Nemec believes, will become fans.

Its a real joy. Im so proud that Ive been able to bring this collection together and to share it.

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Rockwell Kent at the Fleming: Art into hands of many, rather than the few - Rutland Herald