Less Is More!

Today is "Be Bald and Be Free Day," a day to be proud of the hair that isn't there.

Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) is one of our favorite bald artists. Here he poses, baldly and proudly, in a photograph taken by the Juley studio.

Kent was a painter, graphic artist, and writer. He developed a signature style of sculptural characterizations and traveled widely, illustrating his accounts of trips to Greenland, Alaska, and the Strait of Magellan. Politically active throughout his life, he received the Lenin Peace Prize—the Soviet-bloc counterpart to the Nobel Prize for peace—in 1967.

Source: Joan Stahl. American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995).

Pictured: Photograph of Rockwell Kent, 1882–1971, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection.