Inaugural show highlights works of ROckwell Kent

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Green is Rockwell Kent’s color. It’s his Helga and his haystacks, his copperized answer to the cool blues of Picasso. His glasses, rather than being rose-colored, were emerald.

So maybe my exhilaration in Kent is just about my longtime love of green, a color of hypnotizing, complex highs and mad, brilliant depths.

I know, I know: After fifth grade, does anyone really care about favorite colors?

Well, yes. And in the small Kent show that opened in July in the new addition to the Monhegan Museum, it’s impossible not to care. Color is light, after all, and the powdery light of Monhegan has been raved about by artists for more than a century.

In these paintings, borrowed from private collections like that of Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth, the skies and seas are always a little greener than expected. In oil seascapes like “Harbor, Monhegan,” the color of Nature rises to the surface but stays deep. It’s as if the light is refracted up from the ocean’s bottom-most layers.

By no means is Kent’s palette limited to grass tones. There’s a rainbow in every vivid sky, and his rocks are brown, pink, yellow, blue and orange. In “Monhegan, Village at Night,” the sky ascends in bands of aubergine and umber, and one wide swath of lemon that turns to minty-blue.

Behind the bare outlines of dark buildings and scattered yellow lights, the sea is midnight rough, one step short of black.

Kent’s subject, always, is the marvelousness of basic elements: rock, water, light. His gift was to see color the way dogs hear, beyond the edges of normal perception. His Monhegan is stark, not muted. It’s a place where the hammer of creation’s force can still be faintly seen, and felt.

“Late Afternoon” channels that force into highly pitched drama, articulated in extremes of light and dark. The sun wears a fleshy halo, white eclipsed by canary, peach and khaki, and it resembles the candle-flame light source of murky Renaissance paintings.

The exhibition, set to last all summer, pairs one roomful of art with a second room devoted to the history of Kent’s years on the island, roughly 1906 to 1910 and 1947 to 1953.

In blurry black-and-white photos from the early part of the century, many visitors will get their first look at the young artist, with his sun-bleached hair, mischievous grin and athlete’s physique.

“He was quite a rascal, wasn’t he — and he was cute,” one woman exclaimed.

The show devotes one corner to Kent’s most famous practical joke, the time he arrived on Monhegan with his new “wife” in tow, to a full day of fanfare and celebration. The warmly welcomed wife turned out to be a male friend of Kent’s dressed up in late-Victorian drag.

Kent was born in 1882 in Tarrytown, N.Y., where his father’s death left the family poor. At summer art school on Long Island, Kent so impressed the school’s founder, William Merritt Chase, that the painter offered the young man a full scholarship to art school.

In pursuit of something more lucrative, Kent instead entered the architecture program at Columbia. He continued taking evening art classes with Robert Henri, the influential founder of the Ashcan School (so called, sarcastically, because they rejected proper academic tradition).

Kent abandoned architecture in his final term and first went to Monhegan at Henri’s urging. The experience was transforming:

“My bag in hand I race up the hill. … Two minutes in my room to get out of … my stylish suit and into an unstylish one, and like a puppy let out of his pen I’m off at a run to see, to climb, to touch and feel this wonder island I’ve come to,” he wrote breathlessly.

Kent built himself a house on Horn’s Hill in 1906, and added a studio nearby four years later. He left a short time afterward, bound for further travels, but left an impression that lasted until his return in 1947.

“We chose him for the first show because of his stature as an artist and his involvement with the community,” said Edward Deci, president of the Monhegan Historical and Cultural Museum Association. “He was here early, at the beginning of a great period for Monhegan art, and he spent a lot of time here in the winter.”

Kent worked on the island as a fisherman and well driller. According to some recollections, he also opened an ice cream parlor at one point with some construction colleagues, and occasionally filled in for the assistant lighthouse keeper. It’s in a newly built replica of the assistant lightkeeper’s house that his work hangs this summer.

Kent watched the island fishermen at work and marveled at their strength, finding his own “artist’s hands” inadequate by comparison. Those hands produced powerful images, however, and power is one of Kent’s subjects. His rocks thrust; his waves swell with wintry insistence.

The best example of his monumentalizing may be “Toilers of the Sea.” The great painting is not in this show, but a small study for it is included. “Monhegan Headland” is also about bigness and the blank quality of the sea.

Kent’s “aggressiveness is unmistakable,” according to a 1910 profile in the Philadelphia Record.

Years later, another writer described the painter as “a new Pied Piper” followed about by a troop of boys, but also a gentle soul who collected trash around the island and cleaned the rocks of other artists’ paint.

His final departure from Monhegan was clouded by political doubts — he had been called to testify on un-American activities during the Red Scare — and questions about the death of a young woman who stayed at his cottage and plunged to her death. (Kent wasn’t there.)

Fifty years later, rumor and intrigue still spice his reputation.

“You can still carry on a conversation on Monhegan about Kent,” said Carl Little, a writer who has published several books about Maine art. “He’s still very much alive on the island. There’s a lot of legend, people still trying to track down his illegitimate children.”

That doesn’t mean he isn’t respected by locals.

“Very few painters have spent winters in Maine,” Little said. “He was one of the few that made that kind of commitment.”