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Rockwell Kent’s View From Greenland

His paintings reveal the value of looking carefully at the territory and the hazards of imperial misrepresentation

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........

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