Overview
Rockwell Kent painted Citadel in 1932 during the second of his three excursions to Greenland. It depicts the most prominent mountain on Karrat Island, which Kent described as a “great citadel.” During the course of Kent’s many far-flung travels, mountains came to occupy an especially prominent place in the artist’s imagination. Kent viewed them at various times as fitting national symbols of liberty, independence, and democracy, as well as spiritual symbols of permanence and eternity. Like Karrat Mountain, Kent—painter, illustrator, adventurer, writer, builder, graphic designer, and activist—presented a roughhewn, complex, multifaceted surface to the world that could be viewed multiple ways from multiple angles.
Citadel was painted thinly over a white ground with the weave of the canvas still visible across its entire surface. The foreground of white snow and background of gray clouds are rendered with simple, fluid, and undifferentiated brushwork. By way of contrast, the dark, jagged mountain is constructed using quick, abrupt, dynamic brushstrokes that register not so much as visual illusions, but as directly applied painted gestures in an almost expressionistic fashion. The sled with figures at the foot of the mountain was added later, sometime between 1933 and 1950. The addition suggests how the objective, documentary aspects of Kent’s Greenland paintings, whether experienced directly or reconsidered in the studio, were always at the service of a much grander romantic, mythical, and philosophical vision of the area. Kent saw the natural world in spiritual terms as “God’s countenance,” not “all that rehash of man’s experience which he terms art, but the eternal fountainhead of all that is beautiful in art and man, the virgin universe.” With its stark, bold, central pyramidal form dominating the canvas, Citadel ranks among the most iconic and abstract of all Kent’s many Greenland paintings.
Entry
Unlike his talented contemporaries and classmates
Citadel was painted thinly over a white ground with the weave of the canvas still visible across its entire surface. The foreground of white snow and background of gray clouds are rendered with simple, fluid, and undifferentiated brushwork. By way of contrast the dark, jagged mountain is constructed using quick, abrupt, dynamic brushstrokes that register not so much as visual illusions, but as directly applied painted gestures in an almost expressionistic fashion. With its stark, bold, central pyramidal form dominating the canvas, Citadel ranks among the most iconic and abstract of all Kent’s many Greenland subjects.
Kent initially went to Greenland as part of the three-man crew of the cutter Direction that set sail from Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on June 17, 1929.
Awed and inspired by what he had seen in Greenland, Kent was soon planning his return. Beginning in the summer of 1931, this second stay, backed in part by corporate sponsors, was a much more ambitious yearlong expedition, during which Kent built a home and immersed himself in the lives of the native Greenlanders.
Kent later discussed his Greenland travels at some length in two popular autobiographical volumes, This Is My Own (1940) and It’s Me O Lord (1955), and near the end of his life published his diary of the second journey as Greenland Journal (1962). Along with Salamina and Kent’s numerous paintings, drawings, and photographs, this rich trove of sources illuminates the circumstances under which Citadel was made, as well as the philosophical and political meanings with which Kent invested his Greenland imagery.
Karrat Island, the setting of Citadel, had caught Kent’s attention on January 2, 1932, when he was riding north across the frozen sea on a dogsled from his base in Igdlorssuit to Nugatsiak.
Interspersed among Kent’s writings are numerous passages that explain how he worked outdoors, along with several descriptions that relate to the imagery of Citadel. Kent first painted Karrat Island from a vantage point near the modest hut that he rented for his weeklong stay in March 1932:
Just as a painter doesn’t have to have a duplex studio . . . so does he not have to have an easel. . . . A stick to prop the canvas with and stones to hold it down: that’s good most any time of year. But in the deep snow, a couch; I found one in my Karrat house. . . . With this couch planted to its belly in the snow, my canvas propped up at the arm-embellished end, my palette flat in front of it, I sat next morning on the hill and worked. My theme was mountains, and its foreground . . . the snow plain of the frozen fiord. . . . It must have been near noon when, looking up, I saw that there had crept into my foreground plane a minute sledge propelled by insect dogs. They did look small in that immense environment.
Alternately, Kent may have executed Citadel while passing by the island in early April: “I broke camp and drove out of the fiord. I stopped to paint Karrat Island from the south. The day was gray but clear: the fog seemed only to linger in the fiord. After painting Karrat from the south, I drove out and painted its fine mountain from the west.”
I would attach a large canvas to the stanchion of my sledge as upon an easel; I’d hang my bag of paints and brushes from the crossbar, lay my palette on the sledge. I’d catch my dogs and harness them. And then, after the mad stampede downhill and over the shore ice . . . I’d recline upon my reindeer skin with the indolence of a sultan and drive off. . . . Arrived, I’d halt my dogs . . . lay out my paints and brushes, get to work. To keep my brush hand warm I used a down-stuffed thumbless mitten through a hole in which I would insert the brush, and hold it in my warm bare fingers. I found it sometimes cold work . . . my blood seemed not to circulate.
Regarding his arctic painting methods, Kent even went so far as to make the rather implausible claim that “nowhere else in all my travels, nor at home, have I been enabled to get about with all my painter’s paraphernalia with such ease, and paint in such comfort, as in Greenland.”
Kent identified the location of Citadel when he published a reproduction of the painting bearing the handwritten caption “Karrat Island” in 1933.
Notably, the sled with figures seen at the foot of the mountain in Citadel was missing from Kent’s 1933 reproduction
Beyond the significance of small, visual motifs such as the sled, the vast mountainous terrain of Greenland held an even wider and more intense range of meanings for Kent. Seeing the natural world in spiritual terms as “God’s countenance,” not “all that rehash of man’s experience which he terms art, but the eternal fountainhead of all that is beautiful in art and man, the virgin universe,” Kent wondered: “Why don’t men in a godless age go to worship mountains?”
Given its iconic qualities Citadel might finally be understood as a type of self-portrait. Like Karrat Mountain, Kent—painter, illustrator, adventurer, writer, builder, graphic designer, and activist—projected a roughhewn, complex, multifaceted surface toward the world that could be viewed multiple ways from multiple angles. Simultaneously, like a citadel or stronghold, Kent was a self-reliant and self-contained man, a supreme egotist working in distant lands who steadfastly protected his own creative independence and whose inner core remained locked away and off limits. One measure of that independence is the difficulty of assigning a secure place to Kent in the canon of American modernism. Controversial and contradictory, Kent, like another lifelong painter of mountains, Marsden Hartley, was too elusive a personality and too talented an artist to be definitively categorized.
Charles Brock
September 29, 2016
Inscription
lower right: Rockwell Kent; reverse, in black crayon: Landscape Snow
Provenance
Purchased 1950 through (Macbeth Gallery, New York) by J.J. Ryan [d. 1970], Oak Ridge Estate, Arrington, Virginia;[1] his nephew, Peter H. Brady; purchased 2008 by Edward and Deborah Shein, Seekonk, Massachusetts; gift 2013 to NGA.
Exhibition History
- 1937
- Greenland Paintings and Prints: Rockwell Kent, Gallery of Modern Masters, Washington, 1937, no. 13.
- 1940
- Paintings, Lithographs, Wood Cuts by Rockwell Kent, Meinhard-Taylor Galleries, Houston, 1940, no. 7.
- 1940
- [Rockwell Kent], Dayton Art Institute, 1940, unpublished checklist.
- 1969
- Rockwell Kent: The Early Years, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, 1969, no. 55, repro., as Citadel, Greenland.
- 1985
- "An Enkindled Eye": The Paintings of Rockwell Kent, Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art: Portland (Maine) Museum of Art; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, 1985-1986, no. 61, repro., as Citadel, Greenland.
Technical Summary
The painting is executed on a medium-weight, plain-weave fabric that was pre-primed with a thick, off-white layer and is stretched over a piece of quarter-inch-thick plywood, then tacked to the reverse. Infrared examination
Bibliography
- 1933
- Kent, Rockwell, and Carl Zigrosser. Rockwellkentiana: Few Words and Many Pictures by R.K. and, by Carl Zigrosser, A Bibliography and List of Prints. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933, n.p., repro.
- 1955
- Kent, Rockwell. It’s Me O Lord. New York, 1955: color repro. 240.
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