Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rockwell Kent
American; 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
43%
An Ocean Headland. 1907. Oil on canvas
This painting is a domestication of Winslow Homer; it's derivative of him not just because it's a seascape with crags but because it balances intense handling with flat and calm, and because of the way its silhouettes manage not just the tones but the shape of the water. But with its dry surface and corpulent forms and selective indulgence in the weight of the paint and the shape of the brush, the painting points forwards to later American modernisms rather than backwards to the hard nose of 19th-century American art. In so doing it seems to have misrecognized, or willfully abandoned, the sense for things' realness — and the hardheaded effort to register this reality in and as pictures — that underlay Homer's project. I don't like how Rockwell's colors seems to sit just outside the objects they convey, or how he tosses around his brushstrokes without making it a principle of the painting, or how the cliffs are ever so slightly defined and ever so slightly obscure. There's not a lot of conviction in this picture. (TFS, 2026)