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Rockwell Kent's reverse paintings on glass.(Cover story)
A brief but dazzling chapter in the history of American art began during World War I, when several artists explored the many conceptual and visual possibilities of glass as a support for paint. (1) The iconoclastic Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), for example, worked for many years on two huge sheets of heavy plate glass for his monumental work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) of 1915-1923 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Joseph Stella (1877-1946) painted on the back of sturdy but smaller pieces of glass, sometimes incorporating lead wire to delineate his colorful, often abstracted forms like those found in the Prestidigitator of about 1916 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City). Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) and Rockwell Kent (see Fig. 2) also experimented with reverse painting on glass in the summer and winter of 1917, respectively. Hartley rendered flowers in vases and other still lifes, and, on even more dauntingly fragile panes of glass, Kent painted idylls imbued with the enchantment of fairy tales. Virtually unknown, rarely seen, and never before illustrated as a group, Kent's reverse paintings on glass offer new insights into his creative engagement with modern art and ideas.
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In both style and approach, Kent's series of reverse paintings on glass--created in New York City in his Greenwich Village studio apartment--marked a departure from the rugged plein-air paintings that form the bedrock of his enduring contribution to the evolution of modem American art. Trained by the preeminent teachers of his day--William Merritt Chase, Arthur Wesley Dow, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Robert Henri--Kent reveled in the outdoors as a painter of land and sea. Chase and Thayer cultivated his interest in the drama of nature, and Dow offered him an innovative approach to the aesthetics of composition and design. Henri challenged artists of his generation, who included George Bellows (1882-1925) and Edward Hopper (1882-1967), to infuse their work with a new spirit and to exceed the limits of subject matter countenanced by the old guard at the National Academy of Design in New York City.
From 1905 to 1910, Kent boldly portrayed the turbulent seas of the Maine coast and the monolithic headlands of Monhegan Island. As early as April 1907, during his first one-man exhibition in New York City, critics and colleagues praised his gifts as an aggressive colorist and imaginative interpreter of the natural world. Over the succeeding twenty-five years, Kent journeyed to more distant, and often more forbidding, places such as Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland, and Greenland. Grounded in the values of American transcendentalism, his restless life as a painter became widely known through the many adventure memoirs he wrote and illustrated.
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