Adaline Kent

Altman Siegel is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture, drawings, and uniquely incised paintings on Hydrocal by midcentury artist Adaline Kent (1900-1957). This exhibition marks the gallery’s first presentation with the artist’s estate and is the first exhibition dedicated to Kent’s work in San Francisco in more than two decades.

Adaline Kent lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of her life. Inspired by time spent in the mountains of the High Sierra - and her observations of the way bodies move through space - her work captures elegant, elemental movements through biomorphic shapes and forms. Evoking a diverse array of imagery ranging from mountains, streams, and trees to the more abstract infinity symbol, Kent was a pioneer of the mid-century modernist aesthetic, working with luminaries from renowned landscape architect Thomas Church to storied gallerist Betty Parsons. Her dedication to creating visual movement and balance through static form transcends time, remaining as deeply resonant today as it was during Kent’s lifetime.

Adaline Kent was born in 1900 into a prominent family of early environmentalists. Her father, California Congressman William Kent, and her mother, Elizabeth Thacher Kent, a leader in the cause of women’s suffrage, donated the land that established the Muir Woods National Monument, preserving a large swath of old growth coast redwoods in Marin County, California. In the 1920s, after graduating from college (Vassar 1923), Kent studied under the social realist sculptor Ralph Stackpole while attending the California School of Fine Arts (later known as San Francisco Art Institute) and traveled to Paris to study with Émile Antoine Bouredelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Upon returning to San Francisco, Kent established a studio in the “Monkey Block,” becoming a fixture in the vibrant neighborhood of artist studios on Montgomery Street where the Transamerica building stands today.

The 1940s and World War II brought many Americans home who had been living abroad, including Kent’s brother-in-law, Charles Houghton Howard (1899–1978), a Surrealist painter who returned from living in London. The influence of Surrealism is evident in Kent’s increasingly abstract work. The exhibition includes three incised paintings in Hydrocal, in which the landscape dissolves into biomorphic shapes and forms. Unique in the history of modernism, these works straddle the line between drawing, painting, and sculpture. The infinity symbol recurs here in Song, from 1945, which echoes the fluid composition of the Cascade from the Mountain drawings, and again in Writ, 1947.

By 1949, Kent’s work found a wider audience as she became one of the few woman artists to exhibit with storied American artist and New York gallerist, Betty Parsons. As Kent evolved alongside contemporaries such as Ruth Asawa, Mark Rothko, and Isamu Noguchi, her work grew more abstract. Punctuated with negative spaces, these malleable sculptures lacked specificity, evoking imagery ranging from the branches of evergreen trees to the slopes of mountain ranges using dimpled, earthen terracotta. A 1954 trip to Greece, Egypt and Paris inspired a series of later terracotta sculptures on view. These vessel forms draw from the Mediterranean landscapes and ancient artifacts that Kent encountered and documented on her travels. The perforated terracotta forms are reminiscent of a series of her lamps commissioned for the Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite National Park’s iconic lodge in 1954.

Adaline Kent was a member of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most prolific midcentury artistic circle. The second gallery of the exhibition places the work of this Bay Area legend within the context of the dynamic artistic milieu in which she lived and worked. In marrying Robert B. Howard, she joined the “First Family of Bay Area Modernism” including architect John Galen Howard, who designed the Campanile at the University of California Berkeley, surrealist painter Charles Howard and his wife Madge Knight, social realist muralist and printmaker John Langley Howard; architect of Coit Tower Henry Temple Howard, and his wife artist Jane Berlandina.