Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent by Constance Martin (review)

humanities 509 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 important mystery of our ongoing fascination with this figure and his place in Canadian and international culture. (PAUL HJARTARSON) Constance Martin. Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent University of California Press 2000. 128. US $45.00 Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent is the catalogue for an exhibition organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts . The exhibition was accompanied by a series of symposia in September 2000, and subsequently travelled to several other museums, including the Terra Museum in Chicago. It was an impressive exhibition, and a major event in the current revival of interest in Kent=s artistic importance. The catalogue is by Constance Martin, who was the curator of the exhibition. Like the exhibition, the catalogue is organized into several sections, each focusing on one of the various remote locations where Kent worked, from his first trip to Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, in 1905, until his third and final trip to Greenland in 1935. Also included are works produced in Newfoundland (1914B15), Alaska (1918), Tierra del Fuego (1922), and the first two Greenland trips (1929 and 1931). Prints and drawings are included, but the emphasis is on Kent=s paintings. Kent has long been regarded as one of America=s most important illustrators. His reputation as a painter has been far more problematic, however, and one goal of this exhibition and catalogue is to revive that reputation. Although Kent=s journeys were only one aspect of his long career, they were of central importance, and the paintings they produced were among his finest and most distinctive. The impressive and often unfamiliar selection of works in the exhibition is presented effectively in more than fifty colour reproductions in the catalogue. Martin=s accompanying essay provides basic information about each journey and brief descriptions of several paintings in each section. Because the essay is relatively short, however, the effect of breaking it into so many sections results in a series of texts that are often too quick and sketchy to address significantly the artistic issues posed by the various pictures. The startling, anti-realistic character of the Newfoundland works, for example, gets little attention. Martin is at her best in discussing the Greenland paintings, where her obvious enthusiasm combines with her expertise on Arctic imagery, but even here she is constrained by the essay=s brevity. In an effort to provide a broader context for the exhibition=s theme, the catalogue includes two additional (even shorter) essays by Richard West that discuss Kent=s life and career before and after the journeys that are the catalogue=s main focus. West discusses Kent=s early training and influences, and his later political activism. He also touches on several reasons for the decline in Kent=s reputation as a painter, including the demands of his 510 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 phenomenal success as a commercial artist; the consequences of his political activism (he was summoned before the McCarthy committee in 1953); and his steadfast artistic conservatism in an era of increasing modernism. West is an especially perceptive and knowledgeable Kent scholar, and it is regrettable that he was not allowed to contribute more to the discussion of the works in the exhibition. Two rather different but relatively minor problems with the book should be noted. The illustrations (which are one of the catalogue=s main assets) are provided only with titles and dates as captions, and connecting them to the additional information in the exhibition list is cumbersome because of the failure to number the entries. The other problem derives from the exhibition=s inclusion of a series of Kent=s famous illustrations for a 1930 edition of Herman Melville=s Moby-Dick, which is given significant attention in the catalogue. Even though Martin convincingly relates the imagery of these illustrations to some of Kent=s journeys featured in the exhibition, this group of works remains essentially out of place in relation to the exhibit=s theme, and detached from the broader context of Kent=s career as an illustrator in...