Rockwell, Norman (1894-1978)

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Rockwell, Norman (1894-1978)

Despite his distinction as a popular painter of everyday life, Norman Rockwell has, for much of the twentieth century, represented a point of controversy concerning the definition of art and the nature of American culture itself. Although a sizable public embraced the illustrator as America's greatest painter, others have reviled his work as vacuous commercial art depicting a highly restricted spectrum of the national makeup. Rockwell's prominence and the prevailing conception of advocates and critics alike—that his task was to represent America—largely issued from his long association with the popular magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. Even when, in the last decades of his life, Rockwell undertook assignments challenging the conservative cultural values of the Post —values which were mistakenly ascribed to the illustrator as well—his apparently unselfconscious, realistic style remained out of step with contemporary artistic practices. By the end of the twentieth century, he was widely recognized as a highly successful illustrator though not as an artist, his name serving as a shorthand term for the values of small-town America that he so often depicted.

Rockwell himself enjoyed the pleasant irony that, this reputation notwithstanding, he was born—on February 3, 1894—in the paramount metropolis of New York City. Although his father's family had once held substantial wealth and his mother took great pride in an English aristocratic ancestry, by the time of Norman Percevel's birth the family's fortune and status had both declined. Rockwell recalled growing up in modest circumstances, and described episodes of acute embarrassment in the face of his own social indiscretions which, he thought, bespoke his lower-middle-class background. Still, his family remained respectably pious, to the extent that Norman and his younger brother Jarvis were conscripted into the church choir by their parents. This religiosity, however, did not stick, and as an adult Rockwell would decline to attend church services.

In his autobiography, Rockwell described a boyhood full of anxieties and punctuated by numerous unpleasant episodes. Amongst his friends he stood out as an awkward and pigeon-toed boy, his face dominated by large, round eyeglasses that earned him the despised nickname "Mooney." He nonetheless participated in all the games and pranks of his neighborhood playmates including, as he later recalled with contrition, incidents of bigoted name-calling. Urban encounters with indigent drunks and rancorous couples enhanced, by contrast, his cherished memories of summer trips away from the city. He would later characterize his early interest in drawing as a compensatory practice that won him admiration from his peers.

As a high school freshman, Rockwell began taking weekly leave in order to attend the Chase School of Art on a part-time basis (c. 1908), and in his sophomore year he left altogether, becoming a full-time student at the National Academy of Design at the age of 15. Finding the academy's program "stiff and scholarly," he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York in 1910. There he devoted himself to the study of the human figure and illustration under instructors George Bridgman and Thomas Fogarty.

Like his fellow students, Rockwell admired and identified with the work of prominent American illustrators such as Howard Pyle and Edward Austin Abbey, particularly their inspiring attention to historically accurate detail and compelling visual narratives. At the same time he esteemed the expressive qualities and technical virtuosity of painters from Rembrandt and Vermeer to Whistler and Picasso. Although modernist practices held little interest for Rockwell in his own art—excepting some brief experiments in the 1920s—neither he nor his peers saw much distinction between the fine arts and illustration. They did, however, disdain other, debased spheres of artistic practice. Rockwell wrote that he and his peers "signed our names in blood, swearing never to prostitute our art, never to do advertising jobs." But the nature of the field of illustration itself was in transition with the proliferation of cheap illustrated magazines (which needed advertisers who in turn needed illustrators), the increasing use of photography, and the demise of handsomely decorated books which had seen their zenith during the so-called Golden Age of Illustration. Rockwell's own practice would soon include the production of successful and highly sought after advertising illustrations.

His first inroads into a professional career included illustrating a didactic children's book called Tell Me Why Stories. Landing the position of contributing art director for Boy's Life in 1913, Rockwell soon developed a reputation as the "Boy Illustrator," referring both to his young age and his favored subjects rendered for an emerging group of youth magazines. These popular magazines, including St. Nicholas, American Boy, and Youth's Companion, were intended to entertain white, middle-class adolescents and promote the same ideals of American citizenry embodied in the Boy Scouts and the Young Men's Christian Association movements. But Rockwell sought a more distinguished venue for his art.

Working for the youth magazines, he was soon able to afford a succession of shared studios in New York City and then in New Rochelle where his family took up residence in a boarding house. Despite his steady income, Rockwell aspired to see his work on the cover of what he considered "the greatest show window in America for an illustrator," the Saturday Evening Post. Setting his sights on the Post he struggled to paint a sample image of a sophisticated society couple in the style of the Charles Dana Gibson, but soon realized that his strength lay in genre scenes, realistically rendered pictures of everyday life. He presented the Post editors with two finished canvases depicting scenes of American boyhood and several like sketches. All were approved, and within two months his first illustration for the Saturday Evening Post appeared on the cover of the issue for May 20, 1916. In his words, he "had arrived." Having broken into the field of illustration for adult magazines, Rockwell was soon submitting work to Life, Judge, Leslie's, and the Country Gentleman. By the early 1920s he would gain substantial recognition and could be selective about his assignments, working only for the most prominent magazines.

Throughout Rockwell's 47-year association with the Post as its most prominent cover illustrator, he continued to undertake a variety of assignments including calendars, books, and advertisements. Amongst his best known works are the annual Boy Scout calendars painted from 1924 to 1976 (he missed only two years); his illustrations for new editions of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1936) and Huckleberry Finn (1940); and the long series of pencil-drawn advertisements for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company done from 1950 to 1963. In 1943, the Post published his Four Freedoms —illustrating the essential principles declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—which soon became successful war bond posters. Each of these has in common the optimism and moral salubrity Rockwell depicted throughout his seven-decade career.

Still, it was his long-standing affiliation with the Saturday Evening Post that marked Rockwell's cultural reception. Between the World Wars and under editor George Horace Lorimer, the Post advanced illustration as a particularly American art. Illustration was characterized there as speaking a common-sense visual language in opposition to modern art as a rarified and intellectualized foreign import. In short, illustration was wrapped in the magazine's conservative and isolationist positions on culture and politics. This legacy, combined with the Post's pronounced decline and unsteady revival as a discredited voice of nostalgia during the 1960s and 1970s, left Rockwell himself as a representative of obsolescence.

In 1963, Rockwell left the Post and soon expanded his repertoire of themes to encompass explicitly controversial social issues. Until this time he had applied his high-detail realism to folksy scenes—usually witty, sometimes poignant—of what appeared to be everyday life in America. As critics would note, this image of the nation's people was generally restricted to white, middle-class, and heterosexual families. Rockwell later explained, in part, that longtime Post editor Lorimer had instructed him "never to show colored people except as servants." And so they appeared throughout the Post and Rockwell's oeuvre. By contrast, Rockwell's work for Look magazine in the mid-1960s explored black-white race relations and the social turmoil which followed the civil rights movement and subsequent legislation. Best known of these is his 1964 image of Ruby Bridges escorted by deputies from the United States Marshall's office as she integrated a white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960 (Look, January 14). Thus, it was only in the last decade and a half of his life that Rockwell's own liberal views might have become readily apparent to a broad public.

This late turn towards inclusive subject matter came packaged in Rockwell's brilliant, if familiar, realist style which itself seemed anti-progressive to many art-scene observers. For them, Rockwell's illustrations, though technically accomplished, lacked artistic freedom, intellectual engagement, and creative insight. Still, he remained popular with a substantial portion of the American public. This disparity was played out when art critics dismissed a popular 1968 exhibition of his canvases at a New York City gallery, and again in 1972 on the occasion of a Rockwell retrospective held at the Brooklyn Museum. Any reconsideration of Rockwell's aesthetic and historical significance proposed by these exhibitions was further stymied after 1969 by the apparent crass commercialism of an agreement permitting the Franklin Mint to produce versions of his well-known earlier images as porcelain figurines and silver coins.

Notwithstanding the failure of earlier attempts to present a convincing reassessment of Rockwell in the 1980s and 1990s, he was reasserted as a significant cultural figure. Popular interest in his work hardly abated as witnessed by the proliferation of Rockwell picture books. In the early 1980s a major fund-raising campaign to build a new home for the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, drew substantial support from prominent political figures, including then President Ronald Reagan and Senator Edward Kennedy, indicating that with regard to Rockwell's reception, so-called traditional values might be severed from conservative politics. At the end of the twentieth century, Rockwell remained an iconic figure, his name serving as short-hand for idyllic values promoting family and community. These deeply nostalgic associations recall an America of the past, one imagined as modern, prosperous, homogeneous, and free of the social ills that plagued the late twentieth century.

Rockwell died November 8, 1978 in Stockbridge. His first marriage, which had followed the success of his earliest Post cover, ended in divorce in 1930. In that same year he met and married Mary Barstow with whom he was to raise three sons, Jarvis, Thomas, and Peter. After Mary's death he was remarried once more, to Mary (Molly) Punderson. The most comprehensive collection of his works is found at the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, to which he left many paintings and papers upon his death.

—Eric J. Segal