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COLUMBIA FORUM
Rockwell Kent: Art and Advertising

"Strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as commercial art. If it is the one, it cannot be the other," Rockwell Kent (Class of 1904) wrote in 1936. "A man is either an artist or he isn't one, and the professional in that field of commercial activity had much better leave the word 'art' out of the title of his profession."

Kent's contempt for commercial art was the result of a deep familiarity. A native of Tarrytown, N.Y., Kent studied architecture at Columbia but left after his junior year to study painting with William Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock School on Long Island. In the first two decades of the century, while he waited for his paintings to generate a sufficient income, Kent worked as an architectural renderer in New York, but America's entry into World War I in 1917 drastically curtailed construction and he found himself out of work. Kent turned to advertising, and despite his claims of regular conflicts with clients, worked steadily at commercial illustration until after World War II, even as his more purely artistic production prospered.

By the 1930s, Kent was recognized as one of America's preeminent painters and illustrators, known for his spare, often bleak landscapes and for his highly stylized, formal figures. Widely known for his wood engraving and lithography, Kent illustrated classic books such as Moby Dick, The Canterbury Tales, and Shakespeare's plays, and became an outstanding bookplate designer. He was also a successful author, publishing and illustrating N by E and Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. In the 1940s, Kent's popularity declined with the rise of modern art. Although he had vigorously supported America's entry into World War II, his reputation suffered from his leftist political activism in the late 1940s and 1950s, which ultimately led to his being brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

An exhibit, "Commercialism and Idealism: Rockwell Kent - Bringing Art to Advertising," at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, (www.plattsburgh.edu/ museum) revisits the neglected commercial aspect of Kent's work. The museum assembled 150 of Kent's commercial works in the exhibition, which also celebrates the 25th anniversary of the museum's Rockwell Kent Collection. This exhibit, on display through December 2000, features images Kent published in newspapers and magazines, such as the ad for a Westinghouse refrigerator seen here. The museum will hold a Rockwell Kent symposium in September 2000.

Plattsburgh's exhibit is one of three retrospectives in the northeast remembering Kent. In May 1999, the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., (www.ADKmuseum.org) opened "The View from Asgaard: Rockwell Kent's Adirondack Legacy," an exhibition of Kent's nature paintings along with some of his commercial art and artifacts from Asgaard, his upstate New York farm; the exhibit will be on display until October 2000. In addition, The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. (www.nrm.org) currently has on display "Distant Shores," an exhibition focusing on Kent's depictions of wilderness (until October 2000).

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