Rockwell Kent at state museum

There's a bit of socialist realism about some of the art of Rockwell Kent, who left almost 900 pieces to the Soviet Union when he died in 1971 a few years after winning that country's International Lenin Prize. But, as the current exhibit at the New York State Museum shows, he also did ads for Rolls-Royce. More to the point, this commie produced more interesting art than the Nelson Rockefeller-beloved abstract painters whose works clutter up the Empire State Plaza Concourse, where thousands of state workers and visitors hurry by them every day without a glance. There's a fine arctic light in "Highways," for example, a scene of snowy by-ways in Greenland that was painted over four years in the 1930s. Kent spent a lot of time in remote places, but also lived in Vermont before settling down on a farm in northern New York, and there are some nice warmer landscapes of rural scenes. The collection is on loan from the North Country, the Plattsburgh state university art museum. I think Kent would have liked it being displayed for free there and now at the state museum in Albany. It's in the museum's temporary exhibit space to the right as you go in, where they've had some good shows in recent years - including one in 2007-08 of American bronze sculpture that included two busts by Augustus Saint-Gaudens of the Civil War military commanders William T. Sherman and David Farragut. The Rockwell Kent show is on display until May 17.