Art: Kent’s Message

Down the corridor from Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley’s office in Washington’s new Post Office Department Building, a bald gentleman who loves flute playing and the frozen North, fortnight ago finished two murals in the smooth, decorative style for which he is famed. One showed the first airmail delivery among Alaskan Eskimos, the other the same event in Puerto Rico. Neither attracted much attention until last week hale, old, Arctic Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson opportunely happened by and disclosed that one of Rockwell Kent’s murals contained the nearest thing to a cryptogram now on view on Washington walls.

From Mr. Kent’s Puerto Rican postman a brown girl in a white shift has just received and opened a letter by which she appears greatly affected, as well she might. It reads: “Puerto Rico miuniera ilaptiumum! Ke Ha Chimmeleulakut Anga-yoraacut. Amna Kitchimi Autummi Chuli Wapticum itti Cleoratatig tit.” To the art officials of the Treasury Department, who hired Mr. Kent, as to other civil servants including Post Office Department guides, this gibberish had seemed merely one more artistic whimsy. But Mr. Stefansson said it was a message in the Kuskokwin dialect of Eskimos in Southern Alaska which meant: “To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends! Go ahead. Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free.”

This minuscule exhortation caused a flutter of official concern and unofficial merriment in Washington. An uninhibited artist, who makes no secret of the complete hospitality he has enjoyed in more than one “igloo,” Rockwell Kent has, when he felt like it, signed his letters to the New Masses “Yours for the Revolution.” After newspapers had interpreted Artist Kent’s message as an encouragement to horrid revolt in Puerto Rico, Rear Admiral C. J. Peoples of the Treasury Department’s Procurement Division solemnly demanded an explanation, let it be known that the murals were not finally approved nor paid for. Greatly amused, however, was energetic Forbes Watson of the Treasury’s division of painting and sculpture. Said he: “In the first place there aren’t many who can read Eskimo around Washington—and I doubt that the Puerto Ricans can. In the second place it requires a magnifying glass to make the writing legible.”

On his farm near Ausable Forks, N. Y., Artist Kent was surprised to hear of all the fuss. “I think it’s a swell thing when people want independence and I think it’s the most American thing one can do to wish them luck,” said he. “In Puerto Rico a large part of the population is asking for at least the right to a plebiscite. It seems to me as an American that, speaking through the pen of the Eskimos, if the people of Puerto Rico want to be free, God bless them and goto it.”