Plattsburgh State Art Museum explores Rockwell Kent's 'Origins'

Dec. 1—PLATTSBURGH — Rockwell Kent scholar Scott R. Ferris submerged himself in all things Kent 44 years ago, and he's still immersed as evidenced in his latest curation, "Origins: The Evolution of an Artist and His Craft: Selections from the Rockwell Kent Collection at Plattsburgh State Art Museum."

The show runs through Aug. 11, 2023.

There is a reception today from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and a Gallery Talk at 11 a.m. Friday at the Rockwell Kent Collection and Art Gallery located on the second level of Feinberg Library on campus.

"It has many parts to it," Ferris said.

"One of them, when I got engaged in this project, I was visiting some old friends. By that, I had started cataloging that collection back in 1978 when I returned to the campus from my study abroad. Ed Brohel was the new director, and he had asked me to catalog the work there. That led me going to the Kent estate (Asgaard Farm in AuSable Forks), so I was cataloging a lot of the material that was at the estate."

TEST OF TIME

Ferris took notes and attached them to sketches, drawings, etc, the output of Kent (1882-1971), born into an elite Tarrytown family and remembered as a top book illustrator of the 1920s/1930s as well as an activist artist with pro-Communist ties that put him at odds with the U.S. government.

"Lo and behold when I was up there this summer at the storeroom at Plattsburgh, I saw that a lot of those labels were still intact," Ferris said.

"That was good. They need that information. But what it showed me, there was a large body of work that was the origins of so much other work not only at Plattsburgh State but for artwork around the world whether it's the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. You will find things where the germination of the results that we see in these museums. So, origins made a lot of sense in two ways."

EVOLUTION OF THE ARTIST

The Rockwell Kent Collection has a number of very early pieces attributed to Kent's childhood.

"I took that opportunity to show not only that but artwork that he created after that time period," Ferris said.

For example, there is a circa 1896 portrait of a woman attributed to Kent in childhood, a circa 1920-21 drawing of his youngest daughter Barbara, and circa 1944 profile of his third wife, Shirley "Sally" Johnstone.

"I also show a sketch that he did when he was basically in boarding school that he illustrates in his autobiography, 'It's Me O Lord,'" Ferris said.

"I also show an architectural rendering that he did when he was at Columbia College of Architecture and another work he did later in life.

"So, it shows how he developed technically as an artist. The other side of that is not just his ability to develop the origins of him as an artist but his technical development. How he later came to learn how you produce a work that's going to be reproducible, for example."

TOP-NOTCH ILLUSTRATOR

Kent was commissioned for innumerable advertisements from Rolls Royce to Steinway.

He learned to create a work where his brushstrokes are invisible or didn't overwhelm the advertisement.

Pencil marks cannot be read in the finished advertisement cartoon.

"That took a technical understanding that evolved just like his own work as an artist evolved," he said.

"So, that's where the origins come from."

KENT CALLING

Ferris arrived on campus in his sophomore year in 1976. After one semester, he studied abroad in Italy and Denmark to study the rest of his sophomore year and first semester of his junior year. When he returned stateside, he went to Miner Institute in Chazy for a semester.

Ferris returned back on campus in the autumn of 1978 and finished his studies in studio art with a concentration in printmaking

It was during that final semester that he started working with Brohel seven years after Kent's death.

"After I did work for Ed and the gallery cataloging the Kent Collection and helping out at the time it was the Myers Fine Arts Gallery," he said.

"It's the Burke Gallery now. I also helped with installing exhibitions. Because of the work that I did, I did a chronology for them on Kent's life as well as cataloging material. Ed showed that to Sally after her second husband, John, (Gorton) died.

"Obviously, Sally needed someone to pick up the work of the Rockwell Kent Legacies, so she hired me to do that. We had the contract with Knopf publishers to finish off the Rockwell Kent anthology that Fridolf Johnson edited. The title of the book is 'Rockwell Kent: An Anthology of His Work.'"

TWENTY-SOMETHING

Ferris traveled to New York City to oversee gallery activity at Hammer Galleries. In the summer of 1982, gallery representation switched to Kennedy Galleries.

"Sally wasn't around that much during that time period because she took the opportunity to get some surgery done," he said.

Ferris did a two-year tenure at Asgaard that coincided with the Franklin Library's facsimile editions of several of Kent's books

"The woman there down in New York with whom I was working, said, 'You're only 23, and you're doing this?'" he said.

"I had already delved into the world of Rockwell Kent at Plattsburgh State. It wasn't necessarily a big deal. It was more just a continuation of work that I was doing. So I guess I didn't give it a whole lot of thought."

CONSERVATOR GOLDMINE

Ferris created very little artwork after his Kent baptism. He followed the art history path versus the studio path.

"Sally did give me, she knew I came from the studio, she said just take what I could use out of the studio whether it was paintbrushes, paint, easel, whatever," he said.

"After that period of time, the paint really wasn't usable. But a story about the studio and that time period, which is very regrettable today is that when you walked into the studio, the hallway, if you will, was loaded with cans of pigments and oils, turpentine linseed oil, paintbrushes, conté crayons, lithographic crayons — all this material that Kent had left behind.

"It literally was a goldmine for a conservator for instance or an art historian to understand further how Kent created his work. If you are a conservator today and you want to know what is this stuff that he worked with that would have provided an answer."

Kent's raw materials were still there when Ferris left in 1982 and when the present owners David Brunner and Rhonda Butler cleaned up Kent's woodland studio after Sally's death

"They took that stuff to the dump," he said.

"They didn't realize the historic value and the conservator's value of that material. Me being a bit timid, I didn't load up the vehicle, so to speak. I didn't have a vehicle. I used my bicycle at the time."

Ferris took a handful of brushes, a portable easel, and a half dozen tubes of paint.

"That's the only evidence really that remains of how Kent worked when you think about it," he said.

"I saved a tube of paint that he had picked up in the Soviet Union on one of the trips. So, it's a literal testament to the fact that he did paint while he was over there. In my 'Forgotten Landscapes' book, I show one of those paintings in a thumbnail illustration. That's a sad story in its own right."

Sally Kent Gorton chatted about turning the house and the studio into a museum.

Today, the house is gone, but the studio remains.

In "Origins," one wall shows three of Kent's unfinished paintings.

"One of them is a very early work that shows us that Kent was, as the critics called him, an athlete of the brush," Ferris said.

"His brushstrokes are all over the place. It's a view of Monhegan harbor that I borrowed from Jamie Wyeth. There are two other works alongside that painting, small unfinished paintings that are from the Plattsburgh collection, that show that he changed how he developed a painting.

"No longer do you see these wild brushstrokes all over the place but you see flat panels of paint that show a sky and earth and seam for instance. A lot of that is in the exhibition. You will see a sketch of just an idea that popped into his head. It's a really rough sketch, and then you'll see a more developed sketch, and maybe even a final cartoon of a piece before it went into production. So again, that's how it ties into the title, 'Origins.'"

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

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