Rockwell Kent was one of America's most popular artists and illustrators during the decades between the world wars. Born in Tarrytown, New York, Kent attended the Horace Mann School in New York City before embarking on the study of architecture at Columbia University. During summers, Kent took art classes taught by William Merritt Chase (q.v.) at his Shinnecock, Long Island, school. Chase encouraged his student to pursue art full time, and by 1902 Kent had shifted his focus to painting. At Chase's New York School of Art, Kent worked under Robert Henri (q.v.), whose individualistic stance proved deeply inspirational. Kent also studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876-1952) and, through family connections, with Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921). During this period, Kent developed a spare version of the Ashcan realism promoted by Henri and his followers. His powerful landscapes of Monhegan Island, produced as a result of an extended visit there in 1905-06, won critical acclaim and established Kent as a rising figure in the New York art world.

Kent's trip to Monhegan was the first of many travels the artist made to remote locales, including Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland. While living in Alaska during 1918-1919, Kent became strongly influenced by the work of English artist-mystic William Blake (1757-1827). Looking to Blake's allegorical figures, Kent developed his own version of the Englishman's monumental style, which became the basis for much of his succeeding work as an illustrator. Although Kent had already gained some notice for his humorous magazine illustrations, the boldness of his new work won a broad following after first appearing in the artist's 1920 account of his Alaska trip, Wilderness. Over the next two decades, Kent became a household name because of illustrations produced for popular editions of Voltaire's Candide, Melville's Moby Dick, and his own travel narratives, among many others. As America entered World War II, however, Kent's pacifist views and German sympathies took their toll on his career. The rise of Abstract Expressionism pushed the artist further from the limelight, and after being blacklisted as a Communist in the early 1950s, Kent faded from public view. The artist died at "Asgaard," his upstate New York farm, in 1971.

Executed in the years following Kent's sojourn in Alaska, the Currier's Adam II reflects the artist's preoccupation with the cosmic mysticism of William Blake. Reclining in an indeterminate landscape of flat plains and pyramidal mountains, a heroic male nude extends his left arm heavenward into a shaft of seemingly divine light. A corona or halo appears above the figure's head, reinforcing the otherworldly character of the scene. Similar figures appear throughout the work of Blake, whose illustrated poems reinterpret Biblical themes and elaborate on the artist's own prophetic musings. Blake, like Kent, was fascinated by mythical accounts of genesis, and in his art and writings he drew parallels between the divine act of creation and the artist's ability to bring his thoughts to life.

Although the title of the Currier watercolor as well as its imagery make reference to the biblical creation of Adam, Kent's rendition of the subject can also be understood as a broader allegory of artistic inspiration and creation. In a letter written to Ralph Jaques, a former owner of the work, Kent stated that the figure, like others he made during the 1920s, "is unconsciously symbolic of myself."(1) Depicting himself as Adam, Kent literally receives divine inspiration. On the other hand, Kent also plays the role of God, giving life to the figures he creates.

In his letter to Jaques, Kent remembered Adam II as one of his favorite watercolors. The work was reproduced as a full-page illustration in the artist's limited-edition book, Rockwellkentiana, published in New York in 1933. At that time, it was cited as the property of W. G. Russell Allen. Jaques purchased the work from an art gallery in 1966 and subsequently placed it on long-term loan to the Currier Museum of Art. In 1999 Adam II entered the permanent collection as a partial gift and purchase.

VSD

NOTE

1. Rockwell Kent to Ralph Jaques, April 7, 1966. Copy of letter contained in object file, Currier Museum of Art.

REFERENCES

Rockwell Kent. It's Me O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1955.

Rockwell Kent and Carl Zigrosser. Rockwellkentiana. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.

Constance Martin with essays by Richard V. West. Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent. Berkeley: University of California Press in association with the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA, 2000.

David Traxel. An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.