Thomas Kinkade may have trademarked the phrase “Painter of Light,” but Rockwell Kent had it down long before the mall-store phenomenon hit the scene.

Up close, in a museum setting, Kent’s big, barren landscapes seem to glow from within. They shimmer with a luminosity that’s hard to replicate in print. They’re best seen in person, and viewers will have the chance in “The Mythic and the Modern,” on view through Oct. 16 at the Portland Museum of Art.

This blockbuster show marks the 100th anniversary of Kent’s arrival in Maine in 1905. It focuses on his career before the 1950s, before his work turned political, an intentional choice by guest curator Jake Milgram Wien, whose extensive study of Kent’s life brings insight and order to an exhibit that could have easily become overwhelming.

“I wanted to make it clear this was an artist who was intensely spiritual and philosophical,” Wien said last week, during a tour of the exhibit. “His commitment to avant-garde artistry ceases when he turns political.”

With more than 150 pieces, this is the largest exhibition of Kent’s work to date. Many of the paintings, including two of Greenland on loan from The Hermitage, have never before traveled to the United States. Other work, including his illustrations under the pseudonym Hogarth, Jr., have never been part of a public display.

“The key is getting people to see these paintings in the flesh,” Wien said. “These paintings from Russia, not only have they not been seen in the flesh, few people even know they exist.”

Wien says Kent, who is best known in Maine for his sun-drenched Monhegan paintings, is “completely understudied.” This comprehensive exhibit does its best to change that. It begins quietly, with a trio of New Hampshire landscapes that lead into his groundbreaking Monhegan seascapes, which his contemporary John Sloan likened to “big prayers to God.”

“They were advanced in their day for their abstract qualities, as well as their intense palette,” Wien said of the contrast between sea and sky, shadow and highlight.

After the Armory Show of 1913, Kent was drawn to “somber Symbolist and expressionist forms emanating from Norway and Germany,” and a group of paintings from Newfoundland reflect this. The iconographic images are a departure, and though the critics appreciated them, they still called the work “odd.”

The Newfoundland paintings weren’t successful, and no one wanted to buy the Monhegan work either. So Kent embarked on a little-known, but lucrative, venture as a satirist. A group of illustrations from Vanity Fair, Life, Harper’s Bazaar and an invitation to Playboy’s Fete Futuriste, as well as a series of reverse paintings on glass, introduce viewers to his alter ego, Hogarth, Jr.

“Rockwell Kent’s paintings did not sell and he had to support his family,” Wien said.

For nearly a decade, he did. Hogarth, Jr., was wildly popular, but by 1926, Rockwell Kent’s star was on the rise. His commercial and fine-art sales began to pick up, and his journeys to isolated locales – Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Greenland – commenced.

Kent was “an individualist, a maverick,” and he wanted to be by himself. His fascination with fables and legends, specifically Norse mythology, led him to faraway lands to create paintings of an equally mythic quality.

“He was a believer in the beauty of the universe,” Wien said. “He was a restless wanderer. … Environmentalists adore this work because he’s idealizing why nature in its pristine form is important.”

On Kent’s canvases, the snow-capped mountains, rocky meadows and roiling turquoise waters of Tierra del Fuego are untouched by human hands. Though people appear in his Greenland paintings, they’re dwarfed by glistening icebergs and shadowy mountains.

The landscapes in this show speak to the inherent spirituality of nature embodied in a favorite quotation from Saint Augustine, which Kent paraphrased in two exhibition catalogs: “And the people went there and admired the high mountains, the wide wastes of the sea and the mighty downward rushing streams, and the ocean, and the course of the stars, and forgot themselves.”

It’s easy to lose yourself in this exhibition. If you go, plan to spend at least an hour there. Take time to read the wall text. And don’t skip the upstairs portion, which focuses on Kent’s early work in advertising and illustration – the interplay of light and shadow is especially masterful in his black-and-white etchings.

To borrow words from author Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, here, everything is illuminated. Rockwell Kent’s work beckons viewers to step into the light.

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.

Rockwell Kent: “The Mythic and the Modern” Jake Milgram Wien, guest curator

Where: Portland Museum of Art

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Thursday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday through Oct. 16 (museum is closed Mondays after Columbus Day)

Admission: $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and students with ID, $2 for children 6-17 years old, free for children under 6; free admission for all 5-9 p.m. Fridays.

Gallery talks: 5:30 p.m. Fridays July 29; Aug. 5, 12, 19; Sept. 9, 30

Information: 775-6148, www.portlandmuseum.org