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By Root 3076 0

reading Goethe and Schopenhauer aloud, playing his battered flute for tips, rowing out to Bear Glacier at a speed of one knot, Kent was like an offbeat Adirondacks hermit in exile. Townspeople had high hopes that Kent, a well-connected New York artist, would promote the virtues of Seward over Anchorage: the two towns were vying to be the tourist hub of Alaska. The painter Henry Culmer had recently done a fine job of painting the interior region for the Alaska Steamship Company, and people in Seward thought that Kent might follow Culmer’s example. Kent, however, let the city fathers down in this regard. The people of Seward were too focused on self-promotion, too phlegmatic, and too eager for tourism to interest him or to stoke his artistic imagination.

During the 1920s, homesteading had increased in the coastal regions of Alaska. Along the beaches, log cabins with spectacular views from the front porches were being built. The pioneers who lived in these cabins gathered coal and seafood on the shore. With remarkable ingenuity, they made their own furniture by hand. In their gardens, because of the rich glacial till and the long summer days, cabbages grew to the size of pumpkins, though the homesteaders did miss having fresh fruit. Many families carved out a decent living but often dreamed about moving to a warmer climate. A favorite sourdough joke in Homer, on the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, was that homesteaders grew “sour on the country” but “didn’t have enough dough to get out.”19

Kent, who was intrigued by ethnography, also befriended a number of Aleuts he encountered in Seward. He venerated Native Alaskan groups and thought that the Aleuts, like all maritime peoples, were riveting storytellers. As a modernist, Kent preferred Aleut primitive art rather than that of the Hudson River Valley school. The intrepid Aleuts were similar to Kent himself in caring little about social structure or about laying down permanent roots. A large Aleut village would have makeshift dwellings, and would usually be situated on an island in the Bering Sea where the fishing was good. Aleuts, to Kent’s surprise, were sexually permissive. Kent marveled at how they used animal parts for tools. Clams, mollusks, and sea urchins were part of their regular diet. Excellent hunters, they used atlatl (a throwing stick) to bring down ducks, geese, and loons in flight. Wild berries grew abundantly on Fox Island, and the Aleuts instructed Kent on which ones were edible.

Kent’s series of abrupt drawings and rhapsodic paintings of Resurrection Bay are, arguably, the finest landscapes ever done on Alaskan soil. They were influenced by Aleut art. Because Fox Island was often foggy, Kent thought of sunny days as a benediction; sunshine was good for painting the brotherhood of man and nature. “The wonder of wilderness was its tranquility,” Kent wrote. “It seemed that there both men and the wild beasts pursued their own paths freely and, as if conscious of the freedom of their world, molested one another not at all.”20

Many of Kent’s brush-and-ink drawings and engravings, free from presuppositions, accompanied the prose of Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska in perfect harmony. The cold far north appealed to his love of forlornness. Even the rotten ice—called aunniq by the Inupiat—had its charms to a symbolist painter.21 “It’s a fine life,” Kent wrote to a friend, “and more and more I realize that for me such isolation as this . . . is the only right life for me.”22

Some of Kent’s Alaskan work is reminiscent of the intricate illustrations by the poet Vachel Lindsay, who tramped around America promoting the “gospel of beauty.” Kent drew Resurrection Bay in a biblical, folklorish way, the style common in the “outsider” art movement of the 1980s. Celebrating the spectacle of life, his paintings and drawings still defy easy categorization. Taken with totemic symbols, Kent populated his Alaskan paintings with Norse gods in a semimodernist style, almost like socialist realism. Some of his images of laborers—The Whittler (1918), The Snow Queen (c.