Leave the Moon Alone

Artist William Kent (American, 1919 - 2012)

Date1964

Mediumhand-pressed monoprint with oil-based inks on handmade rice paper

Dimensionsimage: 47 13/16 × 31 7/8 in. (121.4 × 81 cm)

Credit LineDirector's Fund

Exhibition History"Large Format Works on Paper," KIA Galleries 3&4 (June 27 - Sept. 2, 2003).Label TextAs a self-taught artist, William Kent began creating sculptures and prints in 1947. Kent became interested in art when he attended Yale University School of Music from 1944 to 1947. During the first decade of his career he focused on sculpture. He then turned to printmaking in the 1960s, creating more than 2,500 prints over the next thirteen years. In the 1960s, Kent’s work was often categorized as Pop Art, evoking comparisons to works by Andy Warhol. He continuously rejected such categorization and comparison, retorting that, “I was never aware of Warhol. He had no influence upon me. In the early 1960s he was not really a known figure. It’s the New York art establishment that turned Warhol and other Pop artists into gods.” While his image and objects were adopted from popular culture, his work was philosophically, conceptually and technically distinguished from the movement. In contrast to Warhol’s work that often glorified everyday objects and celebrities, Kent’s interest in everyday objects reflected his political and intellectual commitments. His work addressed a wide range of social issues including violence, corruption, environmental issues, racial uprisings, and the Vietnam War. Art historian Robert McVaugh wrote of Kent’s work: “His prints are not in their essence either about style, about art, or about popular culture. Instead Kent’s prints reflect the frustration of an artist acutely aware of the disjunction between his fundamentally Romantic vision of the world and the socio-political order of his time.” Kent’s Leave the Moon Alone similarly highlights the artist’s progressive views on politics. Created five years before the first moon landing, it responds to the overall political and social climate during the 1960s. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech, where he called for the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” For Kent, the US’s preoccupation with space exploration revealed a poignant hypocrisy: America was still reeling from the Kennedy assassination, racial uprisings, and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to begin bombing North Vietnam. Leave the Moon Alone approaches the moon landing within this complex political context. The work critiques the Congressionally supported multi-billion-dollar trip to the moon, funded by taxpayers but presumably, financially benefiting major corporations. The artist’s particular mixture of emotions is expressed through the form of the Egyptian goddess of the moon (Bastet, the cat-goddess) in the lower left, juxtaposed against an image of an astronaut and rockets on the right side. Kent continued to create biting political and satirical works up to his death in 2012, leaving behind a rich collection of works that remains as relevant as ever. [Collection Highlight]

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