His paintings reveal the value of looking carefully at the territory and the hazards of imperial misrepresentation
Rockwell Kent returning from a trip to Greenland, 1929. (Photo by NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
In June of 1932, the scuttlebutt in Illorsuit, the sole settlement on an island off the western coast of Greenland, concerned the German film crew then crashing about the fjords.
Since their arrival in nearby Uummannaq, the Germans had shot thousands of feet of what would become S.O.S. Eisberg, a joint Berlin-Hollywood adventure flick about a scientific expedition to the Arctic that goes haywire. In Illorsuit, where the population may have been 160 at the time, they were impossible to miss. Camped out on the beach, the cast and crew drank fearsomely and carried on at all hours of the night, screaming, fighting, having sex with each other, and playing ping-pong.
These activities amused the Kalaallit residents of Illorsuit as they made their rounds trapping and fishing. Never before had they hosted such a lively group of foreign visitors, yet they were hardly unfamiliar with the coarse customs of white people. They spotted the local trader (Illorsuit’s Danish colonial administrator, of the Royal Greenland Trading Department) emerge from the encampment so drunk that he crawled his way home along a ditch. Local kids nicknamed the occupant of one tent Adliskutak—“The Mattress”—for the frequency of the sexual visitors observed coming and going. Adliskutak was possibly Leni Riefenstahl, the star of S.O.S. Eisberg, then two years away from achieving even greater renown as the director of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the person in Illorsuit most irritated by the Germans’ antics was also an outsider: a painter from America, bald as a puffin’s egg and nearly as white under his clothes, whom everyone called “Kinte.”
Fifty-year-old Rockwell Kent had been living on the island for months. “Painting; painting incessantly,” he logged in Salamina, one of three diaristic memoirs of Greenland he would write and illustrate. “Pursuing beauty in bewilderment of its profusion, greedy to get in one short year the whole of what might thrill a man a lifetime.” Kent found his pursuit stymied, though, by the “preposterous moving-picture outfit” that had “settled on the district like a locust blight.” To some hapless crew member, he gave an earful: “Your being here affects my work about as my running in on all your shots would affect yours.”
Nearly a century on, President Donald Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland gives this encounter a new salience. On one level, it looks like an argument between the cultural proxies of two aspiring hegemons—the United States and soon-to-be-Nazi Germany—over the right to represent Greenland to the world. The full picture is a little more complicated. Kent, for one, was hardly an ambassador of American expansionism; he came to Greenland a committed socialist and critic of American power—though with certain proprietary instincts and colonial assumptions intact.
Greenlanders were the subjects of this conversation between great powers as well as participants in it, even if their guests engaged them only in rough translation. “The natives saw it all, got it all,” Kent reported. They were assessing these strangers—and engendering in Kent, at least, an awareness of being seen in Greenland while having done so much seeing there himself. The one written account we have of Kent’s stay in Illorsuit from the perspective of a resident emphasizes his reputation for kindness, good humor, and generosity during his stay. Kent was hardy, but alone he would never have made it without Kalaallit hospitality and expertise.
Kalaallit Nunaat, as the land is called in the Kalaallisut language, was no blank canvas or mere backdrop to exotic adventure. The longer Kent spent there, the more sincerely he sought to understand the place from the perspective of his neighbors. That effort was fraught and maybe futile, but their influence ensured that his paintings would amount to commentaries on the question of Greenland’s future—and that later paintings, like the WPA mural Mail Service in the Tropics, would carry more explicit anti-imperialist messages. If Americans didn’t see Kent’s Greenland canvases as such at the time, we’d do well to see them that way now: as late-arriving testimony against the imperial vanity of the United States and Denmark alike.
No American artist has looked more intently at Greenland than Kent did, but he was not the first to paint it.Frank Wilbert Stokes, a student of Thomas Eakins, had accompanied the explorer Robert Peary on two expeditions there in the 19th century. Kent’s utter enthrallment, though, was exceptional. The three trips he made to Greenland between 1929 and 1935 were the culmination of a lifelong search for the sublime in cold places, a journey he followed from Maine and Minnesota to Alaska, Ireland, Tierra del Fuego, and elsewhere.
Stokes’s earlier, impressionistic Greenland has the documentary qualities to be expected from the circumstances of the artist’s visit: His glimpses are those of a traveler in mid-trek, and the landscape is rather forbidding and lonesome despite its elemental appeal. Kent’s Greenland, meanwhile, is incandescent. Glaciers blaze in their fjords. Skies are made of radiant ozone, azure and aquamarine. These are much less violent landscapes, more crisply and patiently observed, exultant in the accord between sun, ice, and sea.
In Artist in Greenland, from 1960, which now hangs in the Baltimore Museum of Art, Kent himself appears with easel and brush in the middle ground with a team of sled dogs behind him. Possibly a tip of the fur-lined hat to Triple Self-Portrait by Norman Rockwell, painted the same year, Artist in Greenland was a playful modification of an earlier work, Iceberg, from 1935. Kent’s wish to figuratively return himself to the landscape 25 years later is no surprise: “How rich in everything was Greenland!” he once wrote. “Whether I sought the wilderness to find in mountain forms the substantive of abstract beauty or to renew through solitude the consciousness of being; or, whether, terrified by both, I turned gregarious and needed love or friendship or to rub shoulders in a Greenland dance—all, everything was there.” Paradise, in a word.
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These days, it isn’t especially radical to say that the history of American landscape painting is deeply tied to the history of imperial expansion and consolidation, including genocide—indeed, the federal government now celebrates it. Last August, the social-media accounts of the Department of Homeland Security trollingly deployed John Gast’s American Progress, from 1879, which is only the genre’s most vulgar celebration of manifest destiny. Much the same message could have been sent with the Edenic, depopulated vistas of the Hudson River School.
Curators from the Baltimore Museum of Art are dutiful with regard to this history in an entry for Artist in Greenland in one of their recent exhibition guides: “Although Kent viewed Greenland’s society as an egalitarian utopia,” they write, “he benefited from colonial hierarchies of power while living in Illorsuit. He depended on the Greenlandic Inuit people to survive, though they are notably absent from this landscape.”
The absence is notable, yes, not least because Kent’s Greenland paintings so often do include depictions of the Kalaallit neighbors on whom he relied. People hunt and fish, socialize, play games, and contemplate; they engage with the landscape in many ways, including by taking pleasure in it, as Kent invites the viewers of his paintings to do. Greenland is supernaturally beautiful in his eyes, but more importantly it’s an inhabited country. There is no suggestion that the people here desire, much less require, administration by others.
Kent’s writings tell a different, more predictable story than the paintings—one that should keep us from mistaking his example for what an ethical, reciprocal, solidaristic relationship with Greenland really looks like. His admiration of the Kalaallit people was based on a shallow understanding of their culture that relied on old tropes about the virtues of their “primitive” simplicity; he romanticized their communal social and economic life, connection to nature, and sexual mores. It may be true that the bond between him and Saalamiit Therkelsen, or “Salamina”—the Kalaallit woman he hired as a housekeeper and who became his lover—had a real emotional dimension. But it can’t be separated from the long record of men like Kent treating places like Illorsuit as a sexual playground, nor from the long-ignored epidemic of violence suffered by Indigenous women and girls in Greenland, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. That terrible legacy of colonialism owes much to the promulgation of racist, false expertise, like Kent’s, that construed these women as hypersexual.
Kent’s paintings can productively raise all these subjects, I think, but they have been very difficult for Americans to see. The reason is simple: America didn’t want them.
After Kent’s appearance before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, American museums rejected his work for fear of associating with a radical. As a result, Kent gifted an enormous number of his pieces—“more than 800 drawings, lithographs and wood engravings,” reported The New York Times, plus 80 paintings, many of them of Greenland—to the Soviet Union, where he was embraced. Not the smallest of McCarthyism’s injustices is that it deprived Americans of those paintings, of that Greenland.
Kalaallit artists today are busy representing their communities, their land, and their perspectives on sovereignty and colonialism to the rest of the world according to their own terms. As for Illorsuit, it’s now empty. But it became so only recently, after the government of Greenland ordered its permanent evacuation following landslides and flooding from a tsunami in 2017. This part of the world is changing because of carbon emissions from countries like the United States and Denmark, as are the other cold places whose beauty Kent celebrated and whose people, he thought, had much to teach the rest of the world. Illorsuit remembered Kent for a long time: The trust he established in memory of Saalamiit, who died of an accidental injury at age 36, in 1936, issued its last disbursements in 2013. Kent specified that its funds were intended “particularly for mothers, married and unmarried, and its administration locally is to be in the hands of the Greenlanders themselves.”
The United States has no right to Greenland, obviously, while Denmark’s own claim is no stronger than the doctrine of “finders keepers.” Even if the threatened American conquest fails, it seems likely that Greenland’s appeal to the exponents of unabashed, extractive imperialism in this century will endure.
Rockwell Kent went there to extract something of his own: not oil or minerals but American art. The profits of those ventures were ambiguous. Ultimately, though, he did the best thing for his neighbors in Illorsuit that any American—that anyone not from Kalaallit Nunaat—could do. He left them alone.
Andrew HolterAndrew Holter is a writer and historian living in Chicago. He is the editor of Going Around: Selected Journalism by Murray Kempton (Seven Stories Press).