An exhibition has opened in the Donegal County Museum in Letterkenny, marking the 100th anniversary of Rockwell Kent’s visit to the remote valley of Glenlough or Gleann Leach in south-west Donegal.
One of the most popular American artists of the first half of the 20th century, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), travelled to the remote part of south-west Donegal, where he painted for 36 works.
While many of these artworks are in private collections outside of Ireland, the exhibition includes two of Kent’s Donegal artworks.
Kent, who was born in New York travelled with his wife Frances to Ireland where he immersed himself in the life of the sheep farmers and fishermen around Gleann Cholm Cille.
He often travelled to remote locations, including Newfoundland, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego and Greenland, to live and work among local people, drawing on these experiences for his paintings.
The US National Gallery of Art said he developed “a stark, realist landscape style in his paintings and drawings that revealed both nature’s harshness and its sublimity”.
A BBC documentary ‘Ar Lorg Annie,’ broadcast in 2018, detailed the story of a local woman Annie McGinley who became an inspiration for Rockwell Kent. She was one of the 36 oils Kent painted around Gleann Cholm Cille.
In the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War, Kent arranged to buy a farm in Glenlough, but the US State Department refused him a visa to travel due to their view of his political leanings.
In a landmark case, Kent fought his country for the right to travel, taking the case to the Supreme Court. After winning his case in June 1958, he returned to Donegal on his final visit.
Kent’s support of leftist causes made him a target of suspicion by the State Department, which revoked his passport after his first visit to Moscow in 1950.
An advocate for nuclear disarmament, Kent was president of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship from 1957 to 1971.
The US National Gallery of Art said as his artistic reputation declined at home, Kent found new popularity in the Soviet Union, where his works were exhibited frequently in the 1950s.
He donated 80 paintings as well as prints and drawings to the Soviet Union in 1960. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967.
Journalist Kevin Magee notes: “As a result of Cold War politics Kent’s Donegal collection was split east and west between the world’s great superpowers, and Donegal lost out as a potential home for one of the most controversial and talked about artists of the last century.”
The exhibition ‘Rockwell Kent, An American Artist in Donegal’ forms part of the programme of the Earagail Arts Festival and it will run throughout July and August. Admission is free.