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.