Life was anything but easy growing up on Cutler Street during the early 1940s. At the time, the bustling street in Schenectady’s Mont Pleasant neighborhood was crowded with low-income and immigrant families. Poverty was common, and there was seldom time to do anything but work.
Today we’ve got the Internet flashing images to us from around the globe, but less than a century ago, it was artist Rockwell Kent who opened Americans’ eyes to scenery they could only dream about.
Relishing stark wilderness vistas of mountains, ice, ocean and forest, Kent lived in Alaska, Greenland, Newfoundland and Tierra del Fuego, the frigid islands at the foot of South America. He painted in and wrote adventure memoirs about these places, and made stops in Vermont, Ireland and Maine, before settling at Asgaard, his farm in the northern Adirondacks.
And yet there is so much more to tell about the complex Kent, who was also a notorious philanderer (three wives and many lovers); and a political activist who embraced socialism as a young man. Posted on June 14, 2009.
Under the alias of Hogarth Jr., Rockwell Kent earned part of his living from magazine cover illustration, such as this 1923 Vanity Fair cover, “Dancing Around the Maypole.”
Rockwell Kent, known for his leftist political leanings, designed this poster, “Save This Right Hand,” for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 1949.
