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Telling Stories:  Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg

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An exhibition catalogue, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Abrams, accompanies the exhibition. It is available for purchase online.

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Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg

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An exhibition catalogue, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Abrams, accompanies the exhibition. It is available for purchase online.

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This B1-level article will introduce your pupils to the Rockwell and Roosevelt Four Freedoms Exhibition (Caen Mémorial, June-October 2019). It focuses and expands on a very specific passage from Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union speech delivered in January 1941 in which he put an emphasis on freedom, or rather freedoms: freedom from fear, from want, freedom of religion and of speech. As the U.S. entered WWII, Rockwell gave shape to these concepts in four paintings that are now world-famous and the subjects of an exhibition in Caen celebrating the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
Vocabulary and structures

war : allies, raging, war

politics : State of the Union speech, terms, president

religion : worship, God, pray

present simple vs be+ ing : describing paintings

past : preterite

past hypothesis : must /may / might / can't have +V-EN

Pronunciation
Rockwell and Roosevelt: the Four Freedoms
Mémorial de Caen10 June-27 October 2019
Information about class visits

Notion(s) culturelle(s) : "Lieux et formes du pouvoir"

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This B1-level article will introduce your pupils to the Rockwell and Roosevelt Four Freedoms Exhibition (Caen Mémorial, June-October 2019). It focuses and expands on a very specific passage from Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union speech delivered in January 1941 in which he put an emphasis on freedom, or rather freedoms: freedom from fear, from want, freedom of religion and of speech.

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You must, and shall, begin every single conversation about Norman Rockwell by addressing the question: "Is it art?" And then you must, and shall, say: "It is illustration."

No talking point for any artist has ever been this tenacious: it sticks around like a haunted stain and will not be released by the soapy suds of repetition. "Out! Out damned spot!" you cry, but to no avail. You are cursed to begin every Rockwell conversation with the ritual: a question to which we all know the answer, and the empty answer which we must perpetually repeat. Guardians of aesthetics will stand by it, pretend to defend it against an onslaught of imagined hayseeds and phonies, and raise a red flag any time someone admires a brushstroke or appears overly enthusiastic about charm or expression or even facility.

To begin a conversation about Norman Rockwell, start with feet at least shoulder width apart, arms folded in defiance of sentiment, jingoism, and poor composition, and in a contentious tone say, "Indeed, he was one of the most revered illustrators of his time," - and then you must hope like hell to be done with it, for God's sake.

Still, every once in a while there will be a need to delve into greater depth. And by greater depth, I mean money. And by money, I mean an upcoming auction at Christie's.

And so here we are: the Rockwell-was-just-an-illustrator phoenix rears it's unflagging head once again as Christie's prepares to place "The Rookie" (1957) on the block in its May 22 American Art sale.

Chrisite's is estimating "The Rookie" at $20 to $30 million, a range which belies much higher expectations. Inflating Rockwell market confidence is the " record price " fetched by "Saying Grace" (1951), which went for for $46 million at Sotheby's in December. Not unlike "The Rookie," it had been valued at a mere $15 to $20 million.

Demand, Renewed

The problem is, you have to take Mr. Rockwell seriously while he's on the block. The artist was winning-winning-winning in December, with 17 works sold at auction - all for tidy sums. With such a clearly enthusiastic market, the auction houses have to find ways talk about Rockwell in a respectful manner.

Christie's, perhaps anticipating the need to nip snobby criticism in the bud, made sure to insert into its press release a few choice words from senior specialist of American art Elizabeth Beaman:

"During his lifetime, Norman Rockwell was witness to such important artistic movements as Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. In choosing a path of illustration, however, he became as ubiquitous to the American public as the images he created. With over 800 magazine covers to his name, Rockwell earned the reputation of America's preeminent illustrator and helped forge a sense of national identity through his art. The renewed demand for these uniquely American works of art is evidenced by their increasingly strong prices in recent seasons and this particular painting, capturing America's favorite pastime, will surely have wide ranging appeal among collectors."

In a nutshell that near-disclaimer provides another some very useful new tropes to stuff into your bag of much-to-be-avoided Norman Rockwell conversation extenders: Rockwell was an illustrator. He said he was an illustrator. He is marketed as an illustrator. And an illustrator is an artist. Therefore Rockwell was an artist. And he's one experiencing, as Beaman nicely puts it, "renewed demand."

Good Art/Bad Art

If you like what Rockwell did, you may be tempted, in your onerous conversation, to say that he did what he did very nicely. You may be tempted to say he was a top illustrator, or even a very good artist.

Be warned: your friends, colleagues and fellow gallery visitors have been standing about for a while now. Some of them need to pee. Some of them just want to go home. They were not prepared to be taken seriously. So you'll have to be quick about it.

Still, if you must persist, there are other adjectives you can place in front of the word art which may be helpful. Those would be 'good' and 'bad'.

Now the word 'art' is troublesome when aesthetic value is being questioned because too many of you insist on equivocating 'art' and 'good art' - as if the possibility of art being bad is not to be considered. That's because it has become popular to use the word 'art' as an honorific term, like 'hero' - something that is good in itself. Let's dispense with that, okay, Wittgenstein?

Look, it's art no matter what. If the author calls it art, it's art. It's art if Larry Gagosian sells it. My niece's macaroni portrait of her cat, Snoozles, is art. (To be sold in the Adorable Art Fair.) It's all art.

So, even if it's not "fine art" but commercial art, or decorative art, or design, we can still ask, "Is it good art, or is it bad art?"

I say you can ask this. But I suggest you don't. Your audience has grown weary and are likely not up for discussing the nuances of style and historical context.

Historical Context

Once you've knocked yourself out making clear that you know that Rockwell was an illustrator, but that illustrators are artists too, and that you still think he's a good artist, you might have to justify yourself. You've knocked over the straw man that the snobs pretend to joust with: you don't deny that he was doing work for hire; you acknowledge the sentimental quality of his subjects; you don't imagine his paintings have the heft or the complexity of fine art. You are also getting on our nerves.

Time to liven things up: get controversial and discuss Rockwell in the context of his peers in American illustrative painting.

Norman Rockwell began his career with illustrations for the covers of Boy Scouts journals. His next gig was The Saturday Evening Post. He followed in the footsteps of many illustrators who'd already set the tone. The branding was in place. And most of Rockwell's career was spent producing 322 of these covers and similar illustrations for other publications like The Literary Digest, The Country Gentleman, Leslie's Weekly, Judge, Peoples Popular Monthly and Life Magazine.

His own brand - idealistic, sweet, lightly humorous, and easily digestible - was nailed down by the time he was in his mid-twenties and it barely changed over the years. Even those who like to point out that his work turned somewhat topical in the 60's have to admit that he kept it simple: racism is bad, space travel is good.

Still, those who appreciate the Rockwell style will discuss his cinematic knack for costume, expression and movement. His characters were very human, very fleshy and boney. And he really did know how to choose details, like the nearly photo-real reflections in a nickel plated bar stool in "The Runaway" (1958).

Those are the sorts of things one likes when one is looking at illustrations.

Changing the Subject

What I like to do, personally, when faced with a Norman Rockwell conversation, is to change the subject. This, next to "say 'gesture'" is my favorite How to Talk About Art™ tip! With Rockwell it's easy to steer the conversation away. Just bring up J.C. Leyendecker. Now that guy's a lot more fun!

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You must, and shall, begin every single conversation about Norman Rockwell by addressing the question: "Is it art?" And then you must, and shall, say: "It is illustration." No talking point for any artist has ever been this tenacious: it sticks around like a haunted stain and will not be released by the soapy suds of repetition.

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1. Boy with Baby Carriage, 1916

Norman Rockwell always wanted to be an artist. Finding success early as artist/art editor for the Boy Scouts' Boy's Life magazine, Rockwell was also set on becoming a cover artist for The Saturday Evening Post, which was then considered the premier showcase for an illustrator's work. Without an appointment, the artist boarded a train to the Post's headquarters in Philadelphia in 1916, with a portfolio containing two paintings and a sketch idea for potential covers-the editors liked what they saw, purchasing the two paintings for $75, and telling Rockwell to go ahead with his sketch idea. The artist was thrilled.

Boy with Baby Carriage was one of the paintings that landed Rockwell the job, and became his first Post cover on May 20, 1916. Painted in artist Frederic Remington's former New Rochelle, NY studio (which Rockwell and friend/cartoonist Clyde Forysthe rented early in their careers), the humorous illustration was typical of Rockwell's childhood-themed images of the time. Billy Paine, one of Rockwell's favorite early models, posed for all three boys pictured in the painting, earning approximately 25 cents an hour.

Although Rockwell's career with The Saturday Evening Post lasted nearly 50 years, resulting in 321 original covers that made him a household name, the artist never forgot his first big break from the Boy Scouts; he created yearly calendars for the Scouts throughout his entire career.

View all of Norman Rockwell's original Saturday Evening Post cover tearsheets, created between 1916 and 1963, currently on exhibit at Norman Rockwell Museum.

2. The Four Freedoms, 1942

Wanting to support the United States during World War II, and inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt 's January 1941 address to Congress, Norman Rockwell sought to illustrate the President's vision for a postwar world founded on four basic human freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Finding new ideas for paintings never came easy, but the high concept became an even greater challenge for Rockwell.

By chance, the artist attended a town meeting near his home in Arlington, VT, where one man rose among his neighbors to voice an unpopular view-that night, Rockwell awoke with the realization that presenting the freedoms from the perspective of his own hometown experiences could prove quite effective. Rockwell made some rough sketches and went to Washington to propose his poster idea, but the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army did not have additional resources for the commission. On his way back to Vermont, Rockwell stopped at the Philadelphia office of Ben Hibbs, editor of The Saturday Evening Post, and showed him the proposed sketches for The Four Freedoms-Hibbs immediately made plans to use the illustrations in the Post.

It took several months before Rockwell even began the project, as he still struggled with how to execute the concept. Always portraying the man speaking out at the town hall meeting, Freedom of Speech started out with a much different composition; and Freedom of Worship originally was set in a barbershop with patrons of a variety of different faiths. Upon final completion of the four paintings, the artist was exhausted and doubted the concept of his Thanksgiving-themed Freedom From Want.

Running in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post, starting in February 1943, the paintings were a phenomenal success. In May of the same year, representatives from the Post and U.S. Department of the Treasury announced a joint campaign to sell war bonds and stamps-the original paintings were sent on a national tour, visited by more than a million people, who purchased $133 million worth of war bonds and stamps.

Considered part of Norman Rockwell's most important works, The Four Freedoms continue to inspire people of all ages (Rockwell fan/art collector Steven Spielberg even recreated the image of Freedom From Fear for a scene in his 1987 movie, Empire of the Sun). Part of the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum, the paintings have their own gallery created specifically for their display, inviting a space of quiet reflection for visitors.

3. The Art Critic, 1955

A popular, recurring subject in Norman Rockwell's work are images commenting on the practice of both creating and appreciating art itself. For 1955's Art Critic, Rockwell posed his son Jarvis, as a young artist intensely examining gallery artworks that, unbeknownst to him, are staring back at him-blurring the line of fantasy and reality.

An incredibly thorough and detailed artist, Rockwell went through dozens of sketches and drawings to figure out the composition, considering variations of Dutch portraits and landscapes for the artwork examined, before arriving on displays of a Peter Paul Rubens-inspired portrait (modeled for by his wife, Mary) and a group of Dutch cavaliers. On the student's palette, Rockwell placed a three-dimensional dollop of paint, to remind us that we too are standing in a gallery looking at a painting.

The artist's son, Jarvis Rockwell, went on to have a successful career as an artist in his own right, creating more abstract, contemporary artwork. Maya, a Hindu-inspired pyramid, utilizing his large collection of toy action figures, was displayed as part of a career retrospective of the artist's work at Norman Rockwell Museum in the summer of 2013.

4. Golden Rule, 1961

In the 1960s, the mood in America was shifting. Once restricted from showing minorities on the cover of the Post, Norman Rockwell's 1961 painting, Golden Rule featured a gathering of men, women, and children of different races, religions, and ethnicities, with the simple but universal phrase: "Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You." In 1985, Rockwell's iconic illustration was reimagined as a giant mosaic, and gifted to the United Nations on behalf of the United States by First Lady Nancy Reagan -it has remained on display, since that time, in the UN's New York City Headquarters.

Norman Rockwell Museum's traveling exhibition, "American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell" will be on view at Italy's Fondiazone Roma Museuo through February 8, 2015.

Coincidentally, Golden Rule began life as a drawing inspired by the UN's humanitarian mission. Conceived in 1952 and executed in 1953, the original illustration featured 65 people representing the world's nations, surrounding key members of the UN Security Council (USSR, UK and U.S.). The idea was to express hope in the new peacekeeping organization, and Rockwell conducted extensive research, including the photographing of the diplomats and models pictured. After completing the drawing, the artist lost faith and abandoned the project, feeling he was out of his depth. After moving to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Rockwell revisited the idea a decade later, removing the diplomats and focusing on the idea of common humanity, to create one of his most enduring portraits.

To celebrate the 70 anniversary of the United Nations, Norman Rockwell Museum is collaborating with the United Nations for a special exhibition of the process and artwork behind Golden Rule, to be displayed at the UN's New York Visitor Centre from June 2015 to January 2016.

5. Home for Christmas (Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas), 1967

Norman Rockwell's affectionate portrait of his hometown (and home of Norman Rockwell Museum) has come to symbolize the holiday season. The artist began work on the seasonal landscape painting, after moving to the New England town in the mid-1950s-pictured are his original studio (illuminated with a Christmas tree in its second floor window), town hall (which served as a backdrop for his 1955 painting, Marriage License), and the Red Lion Inn, one of the oldest inns in the country.

Working on the painting between other assignments, Rockwell finally finished the painting for McCall's magazine in the late 1960s, perhaps explaining the transition from 1950s-era cars lining the street, to more modern automobiles entering and leaving from either side. On the far right of the painting, the viewer can see Rockwell's South Street home, and studio, converted from an old, red carriage barn.

Living in Stockbridge for the last 25 years of his life, Rockwell once referred to Stockbridge as "the best of New England, the best of America." In 1969, the artist lended several of his works to help preserve an old historic building, The Old Corner House (pictured on the far left of the Main Street painting)-in just a few years, thousands of appreciative fans began to visit Stockbridge to view Rockwell's original art, and Norman Rockwell Museum was born. Moved to its current location in town in 1993, the Museum houses the world's largest collection of artwork by Norman Rockwell, as well as his original Stockbridge studio, on a beautiful 36-acre campus, with inspiring views of the Berkshires. An added bonus: every first December the town of Stockbridge recreates the artist's Main Street painting in time for the holidays.

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5 Amazing Stories Behind Norman Rockwell's Illustrations

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Norman Rockwell always wanted to be an artist. Finding success early as artist/art editor for the Boy Scouts' Boy's Life magazine, Rockwell was also set on becoming a cover artist for The Saturday Evening Post, which was then considered the premier showcase for an illustrator's work.

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Thomas Buechner, a director of the Brooklyn Museum in the 1960s, found a similar power in Rockwell's work: "The point of these pictures is to communicate the emotion to the viewer so that he can either experience it himself or react to it as an outsider," he wrote.

Take Rockwell's 1951 canvas Saying Grace, perhaps his most famous work-voted by Post readers as their all-time favorite cover, and the painting that would later shatter Rockwell's auction record in 2013. It depicts a curious scene in which an old woman and little boy pray in the middle of a rowdy diner. Strapping young men, who look like they have a rebellious side (one dangles a cigarette nonchalantly from his mouth, à la James Dean), watch inquisitively. "They're looking on, they might be curious, they might not agree, but there's still a dignity, a respect to their reaction," explained Plunkett. In other words, Rockwell painted a world in which very different people were able to get along, or, at the very least, respect each other's opinions.

Rockwell spent much of his time passionately observing people around him in New York, where he lived until 1939, and later, in Vermont and Massachusetts. He watched their daily routines, private rituals, and mercurial emotions, using it all as fodder for his paintings. He described his project as "showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed."

While his paintings often contained elements of caricature, Rockwell also strove for authenticity, especially when it came to finding just the right subject. Often, he'd invite the strangers he observed into his studio to sit for him. "He has dragged people out of theaters, from behind store counters, out of trucks, and off tractors and persuaded them to pose for him," Jarman chronicled. "He has deserted one of his own wedding-anniversary parties, which was being held in a New York restaurant, because he had spotted someone across the room who looked like a good model."

Rockwell spent hours, sometimes days, with various sitters, directing them to pose or smile as he sketched or photographed them. Later, he'd combine these studies into intricate narrative compositions. This approach, in which Rockwell connected directly with the American people as part of his process, also extended to the act of painting itself. "I'm trying not to paint the head," he once said. "I want to feel it. I don't paint it, I caress it."

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Thomas Buechner, a director of the Brooklyn Museum in the 1960s, found a similar power in Rockwell's work: "The point of these pictures is to communicate the emotion to the viewer so that he can either experience it himself or react to it as an outsider," he wrote.

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A new biography of the artist reveals the complex inner life of our greatest and most controversial illustrator

Smithsonian Magazine |

I did not grow up with a Norman Rockwell poster hanging in my bedroom. I grew up gazing at a Helen Frankenthaler poster, with bright, runny rivulets of orange and yellow bordering a rectangle whose center remained daringly blank. As an art history major, and later as an art critic, I was among a generation that was taught to think of modern art as a kind of luminous, cleanly swept room. Abstract painting, our professors said, jettisoned the accumulated clutter of 500 years of subject matter in an attempt to reduce art to pure form.

Rockwell? Oh God. He was viewed as a cornball and a square, a convenient symbol of the bourgeois values Modernism sought to topple. His long career overlapped with the key art movements of the 20th century, from Cubism to Minimalism, but while most avant-gardists were heading down a one-way street toward formal reduction, Rockwell was driving in the opposite direction-he was putting stuff into art. His paintings have human figures and storytelling, snoozing mutts, grandmothers, clear-skinned Boy Scouts and wood-paneled station wagons. They have policemen, attics and floral wallpaper. Moreover, most of them began life as covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly general-interest magazine that paid Rockwell for his work, and paychecks, frankly, were another Modernist no-no. Real artists were supposed to live hand-to-mouth, preferably in walk-up apartments in Greenwich Village.

The scathing condescension directed at Rockwell during his lifetime eventually made him a prime candidate for revisionist therapy, which is to say, an art-world hug. He received one posthumously, in the fall of 2001, when Robert Rosenblum, the brilliant Picasso scholar and art-world contrarian in chief, presided over a Rockwell exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It represented a historic collision between mass taste and museum taste, filling the pristine spiral of the Gugg with Rockwell's plebeian characters, the barefoot country boys and skinny geezers with sunken cheeks and Rosie the Riveter sitting triumphantly on a crate, savoring her white-bread sandwich.

The great subject of his work was American life-not the frontier version, with its questing for freedom and romance, but a homelier version steeped in the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of America's founding in the 18th century. The people in his paintings are related less by blood than by their participation in civic rituals, from voting on Election Day to sipping a soda at a drugstore counter.

Because America was a nation of immigrants who lacked universally shared traditions, it had to invent some. So it came up with Thanksgiving, baseball-and Norman Rockwell.

Who was Rockwell? A lean, bluish man with a Dunhill pipe, his features arranged into a gentle mask of neighborliness. But behind the mask lay anxiety and fear of his anxiety. On most days, he felt lonesome and loveless. His relationships with his parents, wives and three sons were uneasy, sometimes to the point of estrangement. He eschewed organized activity. He declined to go to church.

Although Rockwell is often described as a portrayer of the nuclear family, this is a misconception. Of his 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, only three portray a conventional family of parents and two or more children ( Going and Coming, 1947; Walking to Church, 1953; and Easter Morning, 1959). Rockwell culled the majority of his figures from an imaginary assembly of boys and fathers and grandfathers who convene in places where women seldom intrude. Boyishness is presented in his work as a desirable quality, even in girls. Rockwell's female figures tend to break from traditional gender roles and assume masculine guises. Typically, a redheaded girl with a black eye sits in the hall outside the principal's office, grinning despite the reprimand awaiting her.

Although he married three times and raised a family, Rockwell acknowledged that he didn't pine for women. They made him feel imperiled. He preferred the nearly constant companionship of men whom he perceived as physically strong. He sought out friends who went fishing in the wilderness and trekked up mountains, men with mud on their shoes, daredevils who were not prim and careful the way he was. "It may have represented Rockwell's solution to the problem of feeling wimpish and small," maintains Sue Erikson Bloland, a psychotherapist and the daughter of pioneering psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, whom Rockwell consulted in the 1950s. "He had a desire to connect with other men and partake of their masculinity, because of a sense of deficiency in himself."

Revealingly, his earliest known work portrays an elderly man ministering to a bedridden boy. The charcoal drawing has never been reproduced until now. Rockwell was 17 years old when he made it, and for years it languished in storage at the Art Students League, which had purchased it from the artist when he was a student there. Consequently, the drawing was spared the fate of innumerable early Rockwells that were lost over the years or destroyed in a disastrous fire that consumed one of his barn-studios in later life.

Not long ago, I contacted the League to ask if it still owned the drawing and how I could see it; it was arranged that the work would be driven into Manhattan from a New Jersey warehouse. It was incredible to see-a marvel of precocious draftsmanship and a shockingly macabre work for an artist known for his folksy humor. Rockwell undertook it as a class assignment. Technically, it's an illustration of a scene from "The Deserted Village," the 18th-century pastoral poem by Oliver Goldsmith. It takes you into a small, tenebrous, candlelit room where a sick boy lies supine in bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin. A village preacher, shown from the back in his long coat and white wig, kneels at the boy's side. A grandfather clock looms dramatically in the center of the composition, infusing the scene with a time-is-ticking ominousness. Perhaps taking his cue from Rembrandt, Rockwell is able to extract great pictorial drama from the play of candlelight on the back wall of the room, a glimpse of radiance in the unreachable distance.

Rockwell had been taught in Thomas Fogarty's illustration class that pictures are "the servant of text." But here he breaks that rule. Traditionally, illustrations for "The Deserted Village" have emphasized the theme of exodus, portraying men and women driven out of an idyllic, tree-laden English landscape. But Rockwell moved his scene indoors and chose to capture a moment of tenderness between an older man and a young man, even though no such scene is described in the poem.

Put another way, Rockwell was able to do the double duty of fulfilling the requirements of illustration while staying true to his emotional instincts. The thrill of his work is that he was able to use a commercial form to work out his private obsessions.

***

Rockwell, who was born in New York City in 1894, the son of a textile salesman, attributed much about his life and his work to his underwhelming physique. As a child he felt overshadowed by his older brother, Jarvis, a first-rate student and athlete. Norman, by contrast, was slight and pigeon-toed and squinted at the world through owlish glasses. His grades were barely passing and he struggled with reading and writing-today, he surely would be labeled dyslexic. Growing up in an era when boys were still judged largely by their body type and athletic prowess, he felt, he once wrote, like "a lump, a long skinny nothing, a bean pole without beans."

It did not help that he grew up at a time when the male body-as much as the mind-had come to be viewed as something to be improved and expanded. President Theodore Roosevelt himself was an advocate of body modification. Much of Rockwell's childhood (ages 7 to 15) took place during the daunting athleticism of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency. He was the president who had transformed his sickly, asthmatic body into a muscular one, the naturalist president who hiked for miles and hunted big game. In the T.R. era, the well-developed male body became a kind of physical analogue to America's expansionist, big-stick foreign policy. To be a good American was to build your deltoids and acquire a powerful chest.

Rockwell tried exercising, hoping for a transformation. In the mornings, he diligently did push-ups. But the body he espied in the mirror-the pale face, the narrow shoulders and spaghetti arms-continued to strike him as wholly unappealing.

In 1914, Rockwell and his parents settled in a boardinghouse in New Rochelle, New York, which was then a veritable art colony. The Golden Age of Illustration was at its peak and New Rochelle's elite included J.C. Leyendecker, the star cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post. There was more new art by American artists to be found in magazines than there was on the walls of museums.

Rockwell wanted mainly one thing. He wanted to get into the Saturday Evening Post, a Philadelphia-based weekly and the largest-circulation magazine in the country. It didn't come out on Saturdays, but on Thursdays. No one waited until the weekend to open it. Husbands and wives and precocious children vied to get hold of the latest issue in much the same way that future generations would vie over access to the household telephone or the remote control.

Rockwell's first cover for the Post, for which he was paid a whopping $75, appeared in the May 20, 1916, issue. It remains one of his most psychologically intense works. A boy who appears to be about 13 is taking his infant sister out for some fresh air when he bumps into two friends. The boy is mortified to be witnessed pushing a baby carriage. While his friends are clad in baseball uniforms and heading off to a game, the baby-sitting boy is dressed formally, complete with a starched collar, bowler hat and leather gloves. His eyes are averted and almost downcast as he hurries along, as if it were possible to physically escape the mocking gaze of his tormentors.

Rockwell became an immediate sensation, and his work began appearing on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post about once a month, as often as his hero and neighbor J.C. Leyendecker. The two illustrators eventually became close friends. Rockwell spent many pleasant evenings at Leyendecker's hilltop mansion, an eccentric household that included Leyendecker's illustrator-brother, Frank; his sister, Augusta; and J.C.'s male lover, Charles Beach. Journalists who interviewed Rockwell at his studio in New Rochelle were charmed by his boyish appearance and abundant modesty. He would invariably respond to compliments by knocking on wood and claiming that his career was about to collapse. Asked about his artistic gifts, he brushed them off, explaining, "I agree with Thomas Edison when he says that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

By the time his first Post cover had appeared, Rockwell had impulsively proposed marriage to Irene O'Connor, an Irish-Catholic schoolteacher whom he met at the boardinghouse in New Rochelle. "After we'd been married awhile I realized that she didn't love me," Rockwell later wrote. He never seemed to flip the question and contemplate whether or not he loved her. The marriage, which produced no children, somehow lasted nearly 14 years. Irene filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, a few months after the Great Crash.

Rockwell wasted no time in picking a second wife. He was visiting Los Angeles when he met 22-year-old Mary Barstow at the home of dear friend Clyde Forsythe, a cartoonist and landscape painter. Mary, who smoked Lucky Strikes and had frizzy hair, had graduated from Stanford the previous spring in the class of 1929. He had known her for exactly two weeks when he asked her to marry him. On March 19, 1930, they applied for a marriage license at the Los Angeles County Courthouse. He gave his age as 33, chopping off three years, perhaps because he could not imagine why a fetching woman like Mary Barstow would want to marry an aging, panic-stricken divorcé.

For the next decade, he and Mary lived in a handsome white Colonial in New Rochelle, a suburb in which a certain kind of life is supposed to unfold. But within the first year of their marriage, she began to feel excluded from her husband's company. He derived something intangible from his assistant Fred Hildebrandt that she could not provide. Fred, a young artist in New Rochelle who earned his living modeling for illustrators, was attractive in a dramatic way, tall and slim, his luxuriant blond hair combed straight back. In 1930, Rockwell hired Hildebrandt to run his studio, which required that he help with tasks from building stretchers to answering the phone to sitting on a hardwood chair for hours, holding a pose.

By 1933, Rockwell had become the father of two sons, Jarvis, a future artist, and Thomas, a future writer. (The youngest, Peter, a future sculptor, would arrive in 1936.) But Rockwell was grappling with the suspicion that he did not feel any more attracted to his second wife than he had to his first. He still cultivated close relationships with men outside his family. In September 1934, he and Fred Hildebrandt headed off on a two-week fishing expedition in the wilds of Canada. Rockwell kept a diary on the trip, and it records in detail the affection he felt for his friend. On September 6, Rockwell was delighted to wake up in the cold air and spot him lounging around in a new outfit. "Fred is most fetching in his long flannels," he notes appreciatively.

That night, he and Fred played gin rummy until 11, sitting by the stove in the cabin and using a deck of cards that Rockwell had made himself. "Then Fred and I get into one very narrow bed," he noted, referring to a rustic cot made from a hard board and a sprinkling of fir branches. The guides climbed into a bed above them, and "all during the night pine needles spray us as they drop from the guides' bed."

Was Rockwell gay, whether closeted or otherwise? In researching and writing this biography over the past decade, I found myself asking the question repeatedly.

Granted, he married three times, but his marriages were largely unsatisfactory. The great romance for Rockwell, to my mind, lay in his friendships with men, from whom he received something that was probably deeper than sex.

In the fall of 1938, Rockwell and Mary bought a farmhouse set on 60 acres in southern Vermont. Rockwell learned about the village of Arlington from Hildebrandt, who fished there every spring. Eager to reinvent his art by finding new models and subjects, he left New Rochelle and became a proud New Englander. However, unlike the archetypical Vermonters whom he would portray in his paintings-people who savor long afternoons on front porches-Rockwell didn't have ten seconds to spare. A nervous man, he drank Coca-Cola for breakfast, was afflicted with backaches and coughs, and declined to swim in the Battenkill River flowing through his front yard, insisting that the water was too cold.

Nonetheless, the change of scenery served him well. It was in Vermont that Rockwell began using his neighbors as models and telling stories about everyday life that visualized something essential about the country. New England was, of course, the site of the American Revolution, and it was here, during World War II, that Rockwell would articulate the country's democratic ideals anew, especially in the series of paintings that took their theme from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. Rockwell originally offered to do the paintings as war posters for the U.S. government's Office of War Information. But on a summer afternoon in 1942 when he headed down to Arlington, Virginia, and met with OWI officials, he received a painful snub. An official declined to take a look at the studies he had brought with him, saying the government planned to use "fine arts men, real artists."

Indeed, in coming months, Archibald MacLeish, the poet and assistant director of the agency, instead reached out to modern artists who he believed could lend some artistic prestige to the war effort. They included Stuart Davis, Reginald Marsh, Marc Chagall and even Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who, as a native of Japan, might then have seemed an unlikely choice for American war posters. Rockwell, in the meantime, spent the next seven months in a state of jittery exhaustion as he proceeded to create his Four Freedoms-not for the government, but for the Saturday Evening Post.

The best painting in the series is probably Freedom from Want. It takes you into the dining room of a comfortable American home on Thanksgiving Day. The guests are seated at a long table, and no one is glancing at the massive roasted turkey or the gray-haired grandma solemnly carrying it-do they even know she is there? Note the man in the lower right corner, whose wry face is pressed up against the picture plane. He has the air of a larksome uncle who perhaps is visiting from New York and doesn't entirely buy into the rituals of Thanksgiving. He seems to be saying, "Isn't this all just a bit much?" In contrast to traditional depictions of Thanksgiving dinner, which show the pre-meal as a moment of grace-heads lowered, praying hands raised to lips-Rockwell paints a Thanksgiving table at which no one is giving thanks. This, then, is the subject of his painting: not just the sanctity of American traditions, but the casualness with which Americans treat them.

The Four Freedoms- Freedom from Want, along with Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship and Freedom from Fear-were published in four consecutive issues of the Post, starting on February 20, 1943, and they were instantly beloved. The Office of War Information quickly realized it had made an embarrassing mistake by rejecting them. It managed to fix the error: The OWI now arranged to print some 2.5 million Four Freedom posters and make the four original paintings the stellar centerpiece of a traveling war-bond sales campaign.

Rockwell's Four Freedoms did not attempt to explain the war-the battles or the bloodshed, the dead and injured, the obliteration of towns. But the war wasn't just about killing the enemy. It was also about saving a way of life. The paintings tapped into a world that seemed recognizable and real. Most everyone knew what it was like to attend a town meeting or say a prayer, to observe Thanksgiving or look in on sleeping children.

***

As Rockwell's career flourished, Mary suffered the neglect that has befallen so many wives of artists, and she turned to alcohol for solace. Thinking he needed to be away from her, Rockwell headed to Southern California by himself in the fall of 1948. He spent a few months living out of a suitcase at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood as his wife lingered in snowbound Vermont, lighting cigarettes and stubbing them out in heavy ashtrays. That was the year that Christmas Homecoming, the defining image of toasty holiday togetherness, graced the cover of the Post. It is the only painting in which all five members of the Rockwell family appear. A Christmas-day gathering is interrupted by the arrival of a son (Jarvis), whose back is turned toward the viewer. He receives a joyous hug from his mother (Mary Rockwell) as a roomful of relatives and friends look on with visible delight. In reality, there was no family gathering for the Rockwells that Christmas, only distance and discontent.

In 1951, Mary Rockwell turned for help to the Austen Riggs Center, a small psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that catered to patients who could afford months and even years of care. She was treated by Dr. Robert Knight, the center's medical director. In coming months, while Mary was an inpatient at Riggs, Rockwell spoke regularly with Dr. Knight to discuss her progress. Through his conversations with the doctor, he became aware of mood-lifting drugs and ways to tackle his own depression. He started taking Dexamyl, a small green pill of the combination sort, half dexedrine, half barbiturate, wholly addictive.

So too, he became interested in entering therapy himself. Dr. Knight referred him to an analyst on his staff: Erik Erikson, a German émigré who had been an artist in his wandering youth and was one of the most highly regarded psychoanalysts in the country. Rockwell's bookkeeper remembers an afternoon when the artist casually mentioned that he was thinking of relocating to Stockbridge for the winter. By Monday, Rockwell had moved, and in fact would never return to Arlington, except to sell his house a year later.

Settling in Stockbridge, in October 1953, Rockwell acquired a studio right on Main Street, one flight above a meat market. The Austen Riggs Center was practically across the street, and Rockwell went there twice a week to meet with Erikson. Much of what Erikson did in the therapeutic hour resembled counseling, as opposed to analysis. For Rockwell, the immediate crisis was his marriage. He bemoaned his shared life with an alcoholic whose drinking, he said, made her petulant and critical of his work. Rockwell was a dependent man who tended to lean on men, and in Erikson he found reliable support. "All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to Mr. Erikson," he once wrote.

Rockwell was still prone to extreme nervousness and even panic attacks. In May 1955, invited to dine at the White House, at the invitation of President Eisenhower, he flew down to Washington with a Dexamyl in his jacket pocket. He was worried he'd be tongue-tied at the "stag party," whose guests, including Leonard Firestone of rubber-tire fame and Doubleday editor in chief Ken McCormick, were the sort of self-made, influential businessmen whose conversation Eisenhower preferred to that of politicians. The story Rockwell told about that evening goes as follows: Before dinner, standing in the bathroom of his room at the Statler Hotel, he accidentally dropped his Dexamyl pill in the sink. To his dismay, it rolled down the sink, forcing him to face the president and sup on oxtail soup, roast beef and lime sherbet ring in an anxiously unmedicated state.

By now he had been an illustrator for four decades, and he continued to favor scenes culled from everyday life. In Stockbridge, he found his younger models at the school near his house. Escorted by the principal, he would peer into classrooms, in search of boys with the right allotment of freckles, the right expression of openness. "He would come during our lunch hour and pull you into the hall," recalled Eddie Locke, who first modeled for Rockwell as an 8-year-old. Locke is among the few who can claim the distinction of "posing somewhat in the nude," as the Saturday Evening Post reported in a bizarrely sanguine item on March 15, 1958.

The comment refers to Before the Shot, which takes us into a doctor's office as a boy stands on a wooden chair, his belt unfastened, his corduroy trousers lowered to reveal his pale backside. As he worriedly awaits an injection, he bends over, ostensibly to scrutinize the framed diploma hanging on the wall and reassure himself that the doctor is sufficiently qualified to perform this delicate procedure. (That's the joke.)

Before the Shot remains the only Rockwell cover in which a boy exposes his unclad rear. Locke recalls posing for the picture in a doctor's office on an afternoon when the doctor was gone. Rockwell asked the boy to drop his pants and had his photographer take the pictures. "He instructed me to pose how he wanted it," Locke recalled. "It was a little uncomfortable, but you just did it, that's all."

One night, Rockwell surprised the boy's family by stopping by their house unannounced. He was carrying the finished painting and apparently needed to do a bit more research. "He asked for the pants," Locke recalled years later. "This is what my parents told me. He asked for the pants to see if he had gotten the color right. They're kind of a grey-green." It's an anecdote that reminds you of both his fastidious realism and the sensuality he attached to fabric and clothing.

***

In August 1959, Mary Rockwell died suddenly, never waking up from an afternoon nap. Her death certificate lists the cause as "coronary heart disease." Her friends and acquaintances wondered whether Mary, who was 51, had taken her own life. At Rockwell's request, no autopsy was performed; the quantity of drugs in her bloodstream remains unknown. Rockwell spoke little about his wife in the weeks and months following her death. After three turbulent decades of marriage, Mary had been eradicated from his life without warning. "He didn't talk about his feelings," recalled his son Peter. "He did some of his best work during that period. He did some fabulous paintings. I think we were all relieved by her death."

The summer of 1960 arrived, and Senator John F. Kennedy was anointed by the Democratic National Convention as its candidate. Rockwell had already begun his portrait of him and visited the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. At the time, Kennedy's advisers were concerned that the 43-year-old candidate was too young to seek the office of the presidency. He implored Rockwell, in his portrait for the cover of the Post, to make him look "at least" his age. Rockwell was charmed by the senator, believing there was already a golden aura about him.

Rockwell had also met with the Republican nominee, Vice President Richard Nixon. As much as he admired President Eisenhower, Rockwell did not care for his vice president. In his studio, he worked on the portraits of Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon side by side. Scrupulously objective, he made sure that neither candidate flashed a millimeter more of a smile than the other. It was tedious work, not least because Nixon's face posed unique challenges. As Peter Rockwell recalled, "My father said the problem with doing Nixon is that if you make him look nice, he doesn't look like Nixon anymore."

In January 1961, Kennedy was inaugurated, and Rockwell, a widower living in a drafty house with his dog Pitter, listened to the ceremony on his radio. For several months, Erik Erikson had been exhorting him to join a group and get out of the house. Rockwell signed up for "Discovering Modern Poetry," which met weekly at the Lenox Library. The spring term started that March. The group leader, Molly Punderson, had clear blue eyes and wore her white hair pinned up in a bun. A former English teacher at the Milton Academy Girls' School, she had recently retired and moved back to her native Stockbridge. Her great ambition was to write a grammar book. Molly knew a class clown when she saw one. "He was no great student," she recalled of Rockwell. "He skipped classes, made amusing remarks, and livened up the sessions."

At last Rockwell had found his feminine ideal: an older schoolteacher who had never lived with a man, and who in fact had lived with a female history teacher in a so-called Boston marriage for decades. When Molly moved into Rockwell's home, she set up her bedroom in a small room across the hall from his. However unconventional the arrangement, and despite the apparent absence of sexual feeling, their relationship flourished. She satisfied his desire for intelligent companionship and required little in return. Once, asked by an interviewer to name the woman she most admired, she cited Jane Austen, explaining: "She contented herself with wherever she found herself."

They were married on a crisp fall day, in October 1961, at St. Paul's Church in Stockbridge. Molly arrived in Rockwell's life in time to help him endure his final moments at the Post. He hinted at his fear of decline and obsolescence in his 1961 masterpiece, The Connoisseur. The painting takes us inside an art museum, where an older gentleman is shown from the back as he holds his fedora in his hand and contemplates a "drip" painting by Jackson Pollock. He's a mystery man whose face remains hidden and whose thoughts are not available to us. Perhaps he is a stand-in for Rockwell, contemplating not only an abstract painting, but the inevitable generational change that will lead to his own extinction. Rockwell had nothing against the Abstract Expressionists. "If I were young, I would paint that way myself," he said in a brief note that ran inside the magazine.

***

For decades, millions of Americans had looked forward to taking in the mail and finding a Rockwell cover. But starting in the '60s, when the Post arrived, subscribers were more likely to find a color photograph of Elizabeth Taylor in emphatic eyeliner, decked out for her role in the film Cleopatra. The emphasis on the common man central to America's sense of self in 20th-century America gave way, in the television-centered 1960s, to the worship of celebrities, whose life stories and marital crises replaced those of the proverbial next-door neighbor as subjects of interest and gossip.

Rockwell was aghast when his editors asked him to give up his genre scenes and start painting portraits of world leaders and celebrities. In September 1963, when the Post's new art editor, Asger Jerrild, contacted Rockwell about illustrating an article, the artist wrote back: "I have come to the conviction that the work I now want to do no longer fits into the Post scheme." It was, in effect, Rockwell's letter of resignation.

On December 14, 1963, the Saturday Evening Post put out a memorial issue to honor a slain president. While other magazines ran grisly photographs of the assassination, the Post went with an illustration-it reprinted the Rockwell portrait of JFK that had run in 1960, before he was elected president. There he was again, with his blue eyes and thick hair and boyish Kennedy grin that seemed to promise that all would be well in America.

At the age of 69, Rockwell began working for Look magazine and entered a remarkable phase of his career, one devoted to championing the civil rights movement. Although he had been a moderate Republican in the '30s and '40s, he shifted to the left as he grew older; he was especially sympathetic to the nuclear disarmament movement that flourished in the late '50s. Leaving the conservative Post was liberating for him. He began to treat his art as a vehicle for progressive politics. President Johnson had taken up the cause of civil rights. Rockwell, too, would help drive the Kennedy agenda forward. You might say he became its premier if unofficial illustrator.

Rockwell's first illustration for Look magazine, The Problem We All Live With, was a two-page spread that appeared in January 1964. An African-American girl-a 6-year-old in a white dress, a matching bow in her hair-is walking to school, escorted by four badge-wearing officers in lock step. Ruby Bridges, as most everyone now knows, was the first African-American to attend the all-white William Frantz elementary school in New Orleans, as a result of court-ordered desegregation. And Rockwell's painting chronicled that famous day. On the morning of November 14, 1960, federal marshals dispatched by the U.S. Justice Department drove Ruby and her mother to her new school, only five blocks from their house. She had to walk by a crowd of crazy hecklers outside the school, most of them housewives and teenagers. She did this every day for weeks, and then the weeks became months.

It is interesting to compare Rockwell's painting with the wire-service photographs on which it was loosely based. Even when he was depicting an event out of the headlines, Rockwell was not transcribing a scene but inventing one. To capture the problem of racism, he created a defaced stucco wall. It's inscribed with a slur ("nigger") and the initials KKK, the creepiest monogram in American history.

Many subscribers to the magazine, especially those who lived in the South, wrote furious letters to Look. But over time The Problem We All Live With would come to be recognized as a defining image of the civil rights movement in this country. Its influence was profound. Ruby would reappear in many guises in American culture, even in musical comedy. "That painting he did about the little black girl walking-that's in Hairspray," recalled John Waters, the director and writer of the film. "That inspired L'il Inez in Hairspray." L'il Inez is the charismatic African-American girl in Baltimore who helps break down racial barriers by being the best dancer in town.

***

One afternoon in July 1968, Rockwell answered the phone in his studio and heard the voice at the other end talking intently about mounting a show of his work. He was taken by surprise and assumed the caller had confused him with the painter Rockwell Kent. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I think you have the wrong artist." The next morning, Bernie Danenberg, a young art dealer who was just opening a gallery on Madison Avenue in New York, drove up to Stockbridge. He convinced Rockwell to agree to an exhibition at his gallery-the first major show of Rockwell's work in New York.

The opening reception was held at Danenberg's on October 21, 1968. Dressed in his customary tweedy jacket, with a plaid bow tie, Rockwell arrived at the reception half an hour late and, by most accounts, felt embarrassed by the fuss. The show, which stayed up for three weeks, was ignored by most art critics, including those from the New York Times. But artists who had never thought about Rockwell now found much to admire. Willem de Kooning, who was then in his mid-60s and acclaimed as the country's leading abstract painter, dropped by the show unannounced. Danenberg recalled that he especially admired Rockwell's Connoisseur, the one in which an elderly gentleman contemplates a Pollock drip painting. "Square inch by square inch," de Kooning announced in his accented English, "it's better than Jackson!" Hard to know if the comment was intended to elevate Rockwell or demote Pollock.

With the rise of Pop Art, Rockwell was suddenly in line with a younger generation of painters whose work had much in common with his-the Pop artists had returned realism to avant-garde art after the half-century reign of abstraction. Warhol, too, came in to see the gallery show. "He was fascinated," Danenberg later recalled. "He said that Rockwell was a precursor of the hyper-realists." In the next few years, Warhol purchased two works by Rockwell for his private collection-a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, and a print of Santa Claus, who, like Jackie, was known by his first name and no doubt qualified in Warhol's star-struck brain as a major celebrity.

Rockwell's art, compared with that of the Pop artists, was actually popular. But in interviews, Rockwell always declined to describe himself as an artist of any sort. When asked, he would invariably demur, insisting he was an illustrator. You can see the comment as a display of humility, or you can see it as a defensive feint (he couldn't be rejected by the art world if he rejected it first). But I think he meant the claim literally. While many 20th-century illustrators thought of commercial art as something you did to support a second, little-paying career as a fine artist, Rockwell didn't have a separate career as a fine artist. He only had the commercial part, the illustrations for magazines and calendars and advertisements.

Rockwell died in 1978, at age 84, after a long struggle with dementia and emphysema. By now, it seems a bit redundant to ask whether his paintings are art. Most of us no longer believe that an invisible red velvet rope separates museum art from illustration. No one could reasonably argue that every abstract painting in a museum collection is aesthetically superior to Rockwell's illustrations, as if illustration were a lower, unevolved life- form without the intelligence of the more prestigious mediums.

The truth is that every genre produces its share of marvels and masterpieces, works that endure from one generation to the next, inviting attempts at explication and defeating them in short order. Rockwell's work has manifested far more staying power than that of countless abstract painters who were hailed in his lifetime, and one suspects it is here for the ages.

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Inside America's Great Romance With Norman Rockwell

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Smithsonian Magazine | I did not grow up with a Norman Rockwell poster hanging in my bedroom. I grew up gazing at a Helen Frankenthaler poster, with bright, runny rivulets of orange and yellow bordering a rectangle whose center remained daringly blank.

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If you were to ask someone today what they think of when they hear "Norman Rockwell", their answer will most likely involve simplicity, sentimentality, and "traditional" American values. They might even mention his highly famous "Thanksgiving picture" (more formally known as "Freedom from Want"), one of his most well-known paintings and a piece that effectively illustrates the nostalgic sentimentality for which Rockwell is best remembered.

However, it's unlikely that many people would mention Rockwell's equally seminal painting, "The Problem We All Live With", in which a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges and a team of U.S. Marshals walk past walls covered in thrown vegetables and racial slurs on their way to her first day of classes at an integrated school.

Race, and specifically issues of racial discrimination and violence, are not commonly associated with our contemporary understanding of what is "Rockwellian", but perhaps they should be.

As one of the best-known illustrators of the 20th century, Norman Rockwell has come to occupy a very specific space within modern America's collective memory. While Rockwell's name is most-often evoked as a symbol of an idealized, conservative, white American past, looking at Rockwell's actual career reveals a more complicated truth. The evolution of Rockwell's depictions of race over the course his career demonstrates not only changes within his own personal ideology, but changes within American culture itself.

In 1916, Rockwell started working as a cover illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, a position that he held for nearly 50 years. During his time with the Post, Rockwell became famous for his sentimental portraits of American life, and his covers depicted a simpler, more wholesome version of America. However, it is important to note who was missing from these illustrations. Due to the rules of the Post, Rockwell's America was almost exclusively white, and minorities were only represented if they were in servile positions. While the Post seemed to relax their rules a bit by the 1960s, publishing Rockwell's multi-ethnic "Do Unto Others" cover in 1961, their pace of change was not quick enough. In 1963, Rockwell traded his position at the Post for one at Look magazine, a publication that was more comfortable discussing and illustrating the racial realities of the time.

Typical Post covers illustrated by Norman Rockwell over the years:

One of the few images of an African-American by Rockwell while he was working at the Pos t. T his cover d emonstrates the "servile position" requirement of representations of minorities:

It is clear that Rockwell was deeply affected by the racial violence of the day, and it was his move to Look magazine that finally allowed him to publish artwork that responded to these racial realities. His most famous work for Look magazine was also one of his first, and was published in 1964, a year after he started working at the magazine. "The Problem We All Live With" - a painting so powerful that President Obama requested it for the White House in 2011 - effectively illustrates both the progress of, and resistance to, the Civil Rights Movement, and serves as a clear departure from Rockwell's previous depictions of race.

With a career than spanned nearly six decades, Norman Rockwell was perfectly situated to witness perhaps the most rapidly changing era in American history. Rockwell's changing depictions of race throughout his career directly mirror the larger cultural shifts that were happening at the time. Therefore, instead of reducing Rockwell to just one period of his career, it would be more accurate to view Rockwell as a symbol of 20th century American racial progress.

All Saturday Evening Post covers are from the Walt Reed Illustration Archive. To see more of Rockwell's work with the Saturday Evening Post, schedule an appointment with the Douglas B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library.
Image Sources
Freedom from Want: http://totallyhistory.com/freedom-from-want/

New Kids in the Neighborhood: http://www.screensandrhymes.com/2014/03/07/ brooklyn-museums-witness-art-and-civil-rights-in-the-sixties-exhibit-open-through-july/

The Problem We All Live With: http://www.nrm.org/2011/05/norman-rockwells-the-problem-we-all-live-with-to-be-exhibited-at-the-white-house/problem_web-3/

Southern Justice: http://www.public.asu.edu/~kheenan/courses/472 /sp09/rockwelljustice.htm

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Norman Rockwell and Race: Complicating Rockwell's Legacy - University Libraries

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If you were to ask someone today what they think of when they hear "Norman Rockwell", their answer will most likely involve simplicity, sentimentality, and "traditional" American values. They might even mention his highly famous "Thanksgiving picture" (more formally known as "Freedom from Want"), one of his most well-known paintings and a piece that effectively ...

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Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms remind us what the US has to lose

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News that the painter's quartet of works celebrating an apple-pie America is to go on tour emphasises what is under threat in the Trump era

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▼ Primary Sources ▼

Norman Rockwell was born in New York City on 3rd February, 1894. According to his biographer, Karal Ann Marling: "The young Norman was skinny and clumsy at sports. He feared the rough neighbourhoods near his family's home on the Upper West Side. Coddled by his mother, Nancy, who boasted of her English heritage and artistic forbears, he also came to resent her imaginary illnesses and spates of religious fervor."

Norman's father, Waring Rockwell, worked in the textile industry. He was also an amateur artist and spent time with his son copying illustrations out of magazines. Waring also read to his family the novels of Charles Dickens. While he read, Norman drew the characters from the novels. According to one art critic: "His (Norman Rockwell) strong sense of narrative and his eye for the telling detail were byproducts of those long, nurturing evenings in his father's company." During this period his artistic heroes were Charles Dana Gibson, Harrison Fisher, Howard Pyle and Newell Convers Wyeth.

In 1907 the family moved to Mamaroneck, a small settlement on the Long Island Sound. Rockwell went to the local school but travelled the 25 miles to Manhatten to study at the the New York School of Art, an institution run by the artist, William Merritt Chase. In 1909, at the age of 15, he left high school and enrolled in the National Academy School.

Rockwell found the teaching at the academy very conventional and in 1910 he joined the Art Students League. With teachers such as Thomas Eakins, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Art Young, George Luks, Boardman Robinson, George Bellows, Howard Pyle and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it developed a reputation for progressive teaching methods and radical politics. At this time it had nearly a thousand students and was considered the most important art school in the country.

His main teacher was Thomas Fogarty. He later claimed that Fogarty's main contribution to his career was that he taught him the importance of meeting deadlines and following his client's wishes. Fogarty was impressed with Rockwell's talent that in 1913 he arranged for him to be appointed art editor of , the journal of the Boy Scouts of America.

Rockwell really wanted to work for the Saturday Evening Post and in March 1916 he visited its main office in Philadelphia. He showed the editor, George Horace Lorimer, a collection of front cover ideas. Lorimer was so impressed with the work that he purchased two cover pictures and commissioned three more. This was the start of his long-term relationship with the magazine that was to last over 45 years.

The author of Norman Rockwell (2005) has argued: "The pictorial cover was crucial to the success of a magazine. It had to make itself visible and comprehensible at a distance, so the casual passerby would want to pluck that issue off the rack at the newsstand. It had to identify the Saturday Evening Post and carry with it some slight hint of the character of the journal... In a sense, it also needed to mirror the taste and status of the potential reader, who could see him - or herself in that image. Covers were a tricky business, and one crucial to the success of the Saturday Evening Post."

Rockwell's first Saturday Evening Post cover appeared on 20th May, 1916. Boy with Baby Carriage shows a little boy, dressed in his Sunday best, pushing a baby in a pram past two other boys in baseball uniforms who mock him for the "unmanly" task he is performing. At this time, the covers were only printed in two colours, and Rockwell makes good use of the red and back on the white paper.

Rockwell used one boy, Billy Paine, to pose for all three characters. Rockwell used hats, haircuts, and facial expressions to disguise this fact. Rockwell later recalled: "At the beginning of the modeling sessions I'd set a stack of nickels on a table beside my easel. Every 25 minutes... I'd transfer of the nickels to the other side of the table, saying, Now that's your pile."

Later that year, Rockwell married Irene O'Connor, a local schoolteacher. The couple moved to New Rochelle where he takes over a studio that was formerly owned by Frederick Remington. By this time he was in great demand as an illustrator and provided a large number of covers for Saturday Evening Post and The Literary Digest. Rockwell was also recruited to produce illustrations for advertising that appeared in magazines and on posters.

Soon after the United States entered the First World War, Rockwell joined the US Navy. Over the next year Rockwell worked for US Navy publications. After the Armistice Rockwell returned to full-time illustrating. As well as magazine work, Rockwell became involved in designing advertising campaigns. As Karal Ann Marling has pointed out: "The big money of the era was in advertising art. Foodstuffs had been one of the first customer products to be branded... In the 1920s, a new, modern wave of edibles hit the mass market, with a corresponding demand for artwork to sell chewing gum, soft drinks, and candy."

One of Rockwell's most popular paintings, No Swimming, appeared on the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post on 4th June, 1921. The art critic, Christopher Finch, has argued: "We find that it has been painted in an almost impressionistic way. There is no question hem of an outline having been drawn then filled in with color. On the contrary, the image is built up from areas of boldly applied pigment - a well-loaded brush is evident - overlapping and overlaying each other to build up planes that create the illusion of solidity and depth. (Note in particular the way in which the anatomy of the boy in the foreground has been evoked.) Many of the edges of forms have been deliberately blurred in this picture, partly to help produce a sense of speed, but largely as a natural consequence of this approach to image-making. Even Rockwell's highly stylized signature is loosely painted."

No Swimming, Saturday Evening Post (4th June, 1921)

In 1930 Rockwell went to Hollywood to paint the film-star Gary Cooper for the Saturday Evening Post. This was used to advertise Cooper's latest film, . As the author of Norman Rockwell (2005) has pointed out: "His time in Hollywood had important artistic consequences: Rockwell was becoming a master of theatrical and cinematic effects. His covers and occasional illustrations took on the appearance of moments from the movies, when the actors face the camera directly, when directors compose their scenes to under-score key moments in the script, when overstated costuming allows the audience to identify the genre at a glance. Rockwell's trip to Hollywood in 1930 cemented the connection between his art and the art of the filmmaker."

Rockwell divorced Irene in 1930. Soon afterwards he met Mary Barstow, another young school-teacher and later that year they got married. Over the next few years she gave birth to three sons: Jerry (1932), Tommy (1933) and Peter (1936).

Rockwell was a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. However, he was unable to express his political views in his covers for the Saturday Evening Post. He therefore had to rely on subtle methods to get his views across. For example, his cover, The Ticket Seller, that appeared on 24th April, 1937, shows a man selling tickets to holiday destinations, while trapped like a circus lion within his own cage.

Norman Rockwell, Saturday Evening Post (24th April, 1937)

In 1939 Rockwell and his family moved to Arlington, Vermont. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Rockwell offered his services free of charge to the United States Office of War Information (OWI) in Washington. He was rejected by the person in charge of pictorial propaganda with the words: "The last war you illustrators did the posters. This war we're going to use fine arts men, real artists."

Rockwell refused to be beaten and began thinking about he could help. He was eventually inspired by a joint statement made by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill about the reasons why it was important to fight a war against Nazi Germany. In his autobiography, he points out that after returning from a town meeting: "My gosh, I thought, that's it. There it is. Freedom of Speech. I'll illustrate the Four Freedoms using my Vermont neighbors as models. I'll express the ideas in simple, everyday scenes. Freedom of Speech - a New England town meeting. Freedom from Want - a Thanksgiving dinner."

The Freedom of Speech painting showed Jim Edgerton, who had argued for the building of a new high school in Arlington. Edgerton had found no support for his views. But the meeting had listened respectfully to his views. Norman Rockwell considered this was a good example of freedom of speech in action.

Rockwell found coming up with an idea for a painting on religion much more difficult. After making several false starts he painted a close-up portrait of seven individuals of various skin tones, united in prayer. Freedom to Worship included the words in golden letters at the top of the canvas: "Each according to the dictates of his own conscience."

Freedom from Want depicted his own family. The Rockwell cook, Mrs. Wheaton, is shown presenting the turkey. His wife, Mary Rockwell, can be seen on the left side of the table. His mother is the elderly lady seated across from her. Rockwell later recalled: "She (Mrs. Wheaton) cooked it, I painted it, and we ate it. That was one of the few times I've ever eaten the model."

The final painting, Freedom from Fear, was produced during the Blitz. It shows the husband and wife watching their two children asleep. The man carries a newspaper, with a headline referring to the bombing of London. His biographer, Karal Ann Marling, argues that: "The rag doll abandoned on the floor just behind his feet echoes the posture of the sleeping children but, in her limp, discarded form, also alludes to the European children who did not enjoy the safety of a warm bed guarded by caring parents."

When the editor of the Saturday Evening Post saw these four paintings he decided to publish them inside the magazine so that they would be suitable for framing. These were so popular that the United States Office of War Information printed 2,500,000 posters of the paintings. The original paintings went out on tour.

Another popular cover produced during the Second World War was Rosie the Riveter (29th May, 1943). The term Rosie the Riveter had been first used in a song of the same name written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in 1942. The song portrays Rosie as an assembly line worker, who is filling the role of man who had joined the armed forces. By the time Rockwell painted the picture Rosie had become a feminist icon.

Rockwell also produced humorous covers for the Saturday Evening Post during the war. A good example of this is Tattoo Artist that appeared on 4th March, 1944. In the painting the tattoos is in the process of crossing out the names of girls already displayed on the arm of the sailor. The work makes fun of sailors who had the reputation of having a different girlfriend at every port.

Tattoo Artist, Saturday Evening Post (4th March, 1944)

The art critic, Ken Johnson, has argued: "It is no secret that Rockwell relied on photographs to achieve the seeming naturalism of his paintings. But the extent and sophistication of his use of photography from the late 1930s on will come as a surprise to many of his fans and detractors. Rockwell did not shoot his pictures, but employed professional photographers, including Gene Pelham, Bill Scovill, Louis J. Lamone and others who remain unidentified. But Rockwell did orchestrate every other aspect of studio sessions. He found and bought props; recruited friends, acquaintances and relatives as models; constructed sets; and conceived scenes like a Hollywood movie director."

After the war Rockwell was probably the best known artist in the United States. Christopher Finch has pointed out: "We should not judge Rockwell by individual work, nor even by a selection of his finest pictures, but rather by the cumulative effect of his total output. It is this that makes Rockwell so outstanding a figure in the pantheon of American popular culture. Elsewhere I have remarked that it seems, at first glance, almost absurd to talk of Norman Rockwell as having a distinctive style - his stock in trade is quasi-photographic realism, and his technique derives from a variety of conventional academic sources - yet a Rockwell painting is immediately recognizable as a Rockwell painting. Clearly he does have a style that is unlike any other. It is not easy to define. however, because it dots not depend upon any broad mannerisms. It is, rather, made up of small but significant deviations from the photographic and academic norms."

In 1947 Rockwell helped to establish the Famous Artists School in Westport, Connecticut. The organisation, headed by Albert Dorne, ran corresponding courses. Faculty members that included Rockwell, Austin Briggs, Stevan Dohanos, Robert Fawcett, Peter Helck, Fred Ludekens, Al Parker, Ben Stahl, Harold von Schmidt and Jon Whitcomb, produced step-by-step textbooks on how to produce art work for magazine covers and illustrations for advertising campaigns.

Triple Self-Portrait, Saturday Evening Post (13th February, 1960)

Rockwell's wife, Mary, suffered from alcoholism and a variety of other health problems. She was treated at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1953 Norman Rockwell moved to the town to be close to his wife and to receive treatment for depression. In 1959 Mary died unexpectedly of heart failure.

Rockwell also had strong political views. He felt particularly strongly over the issue of civil rights. Ken Stuart, the art director of the Saturday Evening Post, began turning down his front covers. On other occasions, he had section of a cover painting repainted without telling the artist that he had done so. Rockwell threatened to stop working for the magazine, but the editor, Ben Hibbs, promised it would not happen again.

On 13th February, 1960, the magazine's front-cover was Triple Self-Portrait. The Saturday Evening Post acknowledged his importance to the magazine by publishing a serial version of autobiography that year. This was later released as a book, My Adventures as an Illustrator. Rockwell was a great supporter of John F. Kennedy and his last illustration for the magazine was a portrait of the assassinated president on 14th December, 1963.

The death of Kennedy convinced him to join Look Magazine, as a commentator of current affairs. Rockwell's first double-page illustration for the magazine, The Problem We All Live With (14th January, 1964) was one of his most memorable paintings. It shows Ruby Bridges, who in 1960, when she was 6 years old, became involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) campaign to integrate the New Orleans School system. When she entered William Frantz Elementary School in 1960 she became the first African-American child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South.

Rockwell also painted Southern Justice, that dealt with the deaths of three Congress on Racial Equality field-workers in Meridian, Mississippi, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, on 21st June, 1964. The painting appeared in Look Magazine on 29th June, 1965. The magazine also published several of his paintings that reflected his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Karal Ann Marling has argued: "Some Americans turned a blind eye to Rockwell's pleas for racial justice and idealism, however. In the summer of 1964, three so-called Freedom Riders James Chancy, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were killed for their efforts to register black voters in the South. Eventually, their bodies were discovered in an earthen dam in rural Philadelphia, Mississippi. Rockwell responded in Look in June of 1965 with an imaginative recreation of their martyrdom. In the harsh glare of headlights, the shadows of armed Klansmen draw closer to the bleeding figure of Chancy, in the arms of one of his white companions. The painting argues for the brotherhood of the trio and presents their attackers as inhuman creatures of the night. The landscape is an almost Biblical scene of desolation: bare, rock-strewn, and forbidding -a killing ground. It is Norman Rockwell's most passionate indictment to date of the nation whose little missteps and personal follies had been his lifelong preoccupation. The second great issue of the decade was the spreading conflict in Indochina. By the end of 1965, 150,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam and opposition to the war was growing. In a work originally painted for the Congress of Racial Equality, Rockwell shows slaughter as the great equalizer of America's blacks and whites. The two young men who lie side by side in death have become Blood Brothers. In at least one of the preliminary sketches for the work, they wear the uniforms of U. S. Marines."

Norman Rockwell died at his home in Stockbridge on 8th November, 1978.

We should not judge Rockwell by individual work, nor even by a selection of his finest pictures, but rather by the cumulative effect of his total output. It is this that makes Rockwell so outstanding a figure in the pantheon of American popular culture.

Elsewhere I have remarked that it seems, at first glance, almost absurd to talk of Norman Rockwell as having a distinctive style - his stock in trade is quasi-photographic realism, and his technique derives from a variety of conventional academic sources - yet a Rockwell painting is immediately recognizable as a Rockwell painting. Clearly he does have a style that is unlike any other. It is not easy to define. however, because it dots not depend upon any broad mannerisms. It is, rather, made up of small but significant deviations from the photographic and academic norms.

One thing that we will discover if we study Rockwell's work carefully is chat the best of his early works are, in general, more "painterly" than most of his later canvases, though these later canvases tended to make more successful covers. When I speak of certain early works as being "painterly." I mean that they are conceived and executed more as conventional easel paintings, whereas the later works often have the look of tinted drawings (even though they are executed in oil paint on canvas). This difference should not be taken as a hard and fast rule, but it does represent a significant tendency, as a few examples will show.

If we turn to the 1921 cover No Swimming, we find that it has been painted in an almost impressionistic way. There is no question hem of an outline having been drawn then filled in with color. On the contrary, the image is built up from areas of boldly applied pigment - a well-loaded brush is evident - overlapping and overlaying each other to build up planes that create the illusion of solidity and depth. (Note in particular the way in which the anatomy of the boy in the foreground has been evoked.) Many of the edges of forms have been deliberately blurred in this picture, partly to help produce a sense of speed, but largely as a natural consequence of this approach to image-making. Even Rockwell's highly stylized signature is loosely painted.

By 1942, when the poster was designed, Norman had been painting Post covers for 26 years. Every year, the pressure was greater. Would a particular cover sell magazines? Was there another young artist, a better one, waiting in the wings to dethrone him? The Post ran through several editors in rapid succession after Lorimer's retirement: each one had fresh expectations and demands. Would the magazine fold entirely? Was his stuff as good today as it was 26 years ago? And then there were the advertising agencies dangling long-term contracts which would leave Rockwell in a perpetual dither over deadlines on pictures designed to sell canned vegetables and Coca-Cola.

These problems, in addition to the anxieties bred by war, made Norman Rockwell reevaluate his talent and his career. Could he paint a "Big Picture", a real painting, noncommercial, with an important and universal meaning? The immediate inspiration for this shift in focus was the Atlantic Charter, promulgated by President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August of 1941. The Charter would become the keystone of' the American war effort, a declaration of the principles upon which a just world order in the postwar future would rest. The sentiments expressed were noble but to Rockwell's mind, a little too noble to be understood readily by the average American.

Rockwell's paintings are easy to recognize. In the years surrounding World War II his covers for The Saturday Evening Post depicted America as a small-town utopia where people are consistently decent and possess great reserves of fellow-feeling. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students cherish their teachers and remember their birthdays. Citizens at town hall meetings stand up and speak their mind without getting booed or shouted down by gun-toting rageaholics.

This is America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity. Rockwell's scenes of the small and the local speak to us in the age of the global because they offer a fantasy of civic togetherness that today seems increasingly remote. "To me the most important part of Rockwell's work is that it illustrates compassion and caring about other people," the filmmaker George Lucas, who lives in Marin County, Calif., said recently. "You could almost say he was a Buddhist painter."

Steven Spielberg, speaking from Los Angeles, had similar praise. "Anything for Norman," he said, when asked to discuss his work. "He was always on my mind because I had a great deal of respect for how he could tell stories in a single frozen image. Entire stories."

Norman Rockwell is America's best loved artist... America's best-loved artist was an illustrator who, in a career that spanned some 60 years of the last century, almost never painted a picture that wasn't intended to be an ad, a cover, a calendar, a a gloss on a magazine story, or a Christmas card. Indeed, the for-profit context in which Norman Rockwell laboured so successfully may make him the most American of all artists in a period that both witnessed and celebrated the primacy of American commercial enterprise. By the mid-1930s, Rockwell was the most famous illustrator in America, a figure whose success prolonged the life of the "Golden Age" of commercial picture-making well into the 20th century. The economic Depression of the period hardly touched Rockwell; its effects were curiously absent from his work, for the most part, too, as if Norman consciously aimed to distract and reassure his vast following.

Often, in his later work Rockwell uses a rather artificial kind of texture to give the illusion of painterlinetis to what is. In fact, a tinted drawing. In particular, he is fond of a very deliberate kind of impasto (physical buildup of pigment, often applying it in what seems at first glance like a wholly inappropriate way, as for example in his treatment of the mirror in Triple Self Portrait. An extreme example of the application o( this technique occurs in the 1946 cover "Commuters," This is a composition governed almost entirely by carefully drawn outlines, but practically the entire area of the canvas has been further enlivened through the use of thickly textured underpaintirg - roofs. platforms, hillside are all given variations of texture - and clearly this was no accident. Rockwell used this device because he knew that it reproduced well.

Her story was well known in 1964. Robert Coles had written a study of her drawings, showing the effects of segregation on African-American youngsters. John Steinbcck, in his best-selling Travels with Charlie, reported the cruel and hateful epithets that greeted Ruby Bridges every day, as her federal guards escorted tier to school through hostile crowds. By making Ruby small and her guardians large, Rockwell increased the drama of her plight; her white clothes define her as an innocent confronting the evil of American racial prejudice. The Problem We All Live With disclosed a "new," 70-year-old Norman Rockwell, an activist who used the most appealing qualities of his former work to crusade for social justice.

Rockwell's idealism was echoed by that of John P. Kennedy and the stirring challenge to the nation offered by Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign. During 1964, many of the problems and ideals addressed by the young president had already been tackled. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law.... Rockwell reconstructed the Democratic party convention of 1960 in a Look illustration entitled A Tone for Greatness. That phrase came from a Kennedy campaign slogan visible on the placards carried by the delegates in the painting. This time, instead of staging an event and taking a picture of it, Norman worked from press photographs of the event, as a documentarist or history painter, using his art to challenge his audience to rekindle the spirit of the recent past.

Some Americans turned a blind eye to Rockwell's pleas for racial justice and idealism, however. In the summer of 1964, three so-called Freedom Riders James Chancy, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were killed for their efforts to register black voters in the South. Eventually, their bodies were discovered in an earthen dam in rural Philadelphia, Mississippi. Rockwell responded in Look in June of 1965 with an imaginative recreation of their martyrdom. In the harsh glare of headlights, the shadows of armed Klansmen draw closer to the bleeding figure of Chancy, in the arms of one of his white companions. The painting argues for the brotherhood of the trio and presents their attackers as inhuman creatures of the night. The landscape is an almost Biblical scene of desolation: bare, rock-strewn, and forbidding -a killing ground. It is Norman Rockwell's most passionate indictment to date of the nation whose little missteps and personal follies had been his lifelong preoccupation.

The second great issue of the decade was the spreading conflict in Indochina. By the end of 1965, 150,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam and opposition to the war was growing. In a work originally painted for the Congress of Racial Equality, Rockwell shows slaughter as the great equalizer of America's blacks and whites. The two young men who lie side by side in death have become Blood Brothers. In at least one of the preliminary sketches for the work, they wear the uniforms of U. S. Marines.

If you think you know all you need to know about Norman Rockwell, think again. "Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera" at the Brooklyn Museum is a revelation. It is no secret that Rockwell relied on photographs to achieve the seeming naturalism of his paintings. But the extent and sophistication of his use of photography from the late 1930s on will come as a surprise to many of his fans and detractors.

Rockwell did not shoot his pictures, but employed professional photographers, including Gene Pelham, Bill Scovill, Louis J. Lamone and others who remain unidentified. But Rockwell did orchestrate every other aspect of studio sessions. He found and bought props; recruited friends, acquaintances and relatives as models; constructed sets; and conceived scenes like a Hollywood movie director. He might have missed his calling. He could have been another Frank Capra, director of the inspirational sob-fest "It's a Wonderful Life."

Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum and Ron Schick, a guest curator, this exhibition presents more than 100 black-and-white photographs, most of which have never been seen in public before. Along with the prints, which are the product of a recent two-year project to digitize almost 20,000 negatives from the Rockwell archives, are magazine covers and magazine and book pages with reproductions of Rockwell's illustrations.

There are 17 paintings and 10 drawings included, which is more than enough to show what was gained and what was lost in the translation. While the paintings have a sensuous physicality that photographs lack, many of the photographs have a chilly psychological subtlety that is muffled in the paintings.

Occasionally Rockwell indulged in caricature, but more usually, when dealing with the face, he gave us a kind of heightened naturalism that verged on caricature without quite crossing the line. He was particularly good at dealing with such things as family relationships as they are expressed in shared features. He had the knack of concentrating on those little physical similarities that we are all aware of but cannot always define precisely. If we look again at the father and son in Breaking Home Ties, we can see exactly what Rockwell was capable of when faced with such similerities. The hands, too. In that painting are worth careful study. They arc as expressive of family bonds as anything that Rockwell has found in the two faces. Always, then, it is the little human touches that make Rockwell's paintings memorable. Without them, his brilliance as a storyteller could never have had quite the same ring of authenticity.

(9) Jonathan Jones, The Guardian (19th February, 2002)

Rockwell's idyllic Thanksgiving is one of four paintings he made in 1943 to illustrate America's Four Freedoms, to spur his countrymen on in the second world war. They were published in the Saturday Evening Post and the canvases went on a national tour, during which they were seen by over a million people and were credited with selling $132m worth of war bonds. Rockwell's Four Freedoms have lived in the national imagination ever since. Freedom from Want - the Thanksgiving scene - is the most famous, perhaps because Rockwell rightly anticipated that the future of America would be one of galloping prosperity. The others are Freedom of Speech, in which a blue-collar guy gets up to speak at a town meeting and is heard with respect; Freedom to Worship, depicting people of different faiths praying together; and Freedom from Fear, with a couple tucking their children up in bed, the man holding a paper with news of bombing raids in Europe, knowing that here in America no air raid siren will split the night. Rockwell later said he didn't feel quite happy with Freedom from Fear - it was, he said, "based on a rather smug idea" that Americans were safe from external attack.

Rockwell would have loved being recognised as a serious artist. But he might have been uncomfortable with any suggestion that he was an unquestioning flag-waver, cheering George Bush to the next stage in the war against terrorism. He was not blind to America's flaws, even though his art might dream of the way things should be. In the 1960s he was shocked by the violence of the South towards civil rights campaigners. His picture Southern Justice records the murder of activists in Mississippi. It's very different from the cute image of a white boy served by a black waiter on a train that he had painted in 1946. Rockwell claimed that when he worked for the Post its editor "told me never to show coloured people except as servants".

After he parted company with the magazine in 1963, Rockwell became more openly political, and the politics were not what people might have expected; indeed one of the many American artists who chronicled the breakup of Norman Rockwell's idyllic mid-century America was Norman Rockwell. Rockwell's 1960s pictures are images of tension and conflict. The Problem We All Live With (1963) has a little girl walking to a newly desegregated school with an escort of four US marshals. It adopts her scale, dwarfed by the huge legs of the marshals. On the wall behind is vile racist graffiti and the blood-red remains of a thrown tomato. Rockwell was accused by angry letter writers of "vicious lying propaganda... for the crime of racial integration".

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▼ Primary Sources ▼ Norman Rockwell was born in New York City on 3rd February, 1894. According to his biographer, Karal Ann Marling: "The young Norman was skinny and clumsy at sports. He feared the rough neighbourhoods near his family's home on the Upper West Side.

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Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms - Exhibit - The Henry Ford

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View the first comprehensive traveling exhibition devoted to Norman Rockwell's iconic depictions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear at The Henry Ford.

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The Saturday Evening Post's most prolific artist and illustrator, Norman Perceval Rockwell, sustained a healthy art career spanning most of the twentieth century. His art captured the simplest of moments, providing profound insight into the interactions of man. Not only is he famous to the Post' s readership, he is arguably the greatest American artist of all time.
Read the Full Biography >> View More Articles >>
Abigail Rockwell - jazz singer, songwriter, and granddaughter of Norman Rockwell - joins the Post to celebrate the life and legacy of America's beloved artist, sharing behind-the-scene stories only a family member would know in her blog The Real Rockwell.

"Some say life will never be as perfect as life in a Norman Rockwell painting," says Abigail. "But my grandfather's work isn't about an unachievable ideal. Pop's work is about believing in the goodness of people. It's about finding that goodness in ourselves and others and in the moments we spend with one another."

Read more here and on Abigail's Facebook page, Rescuing Norman Rockwell.

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The Saturday Evening Post's most prolific artist and illustrator, Norman Perceval Rockwell, sustained a healthy art career spanning most of the twentieth century. His art captured the simplest of moments, providing profound insight into the interactions of man. Not only is he famous to the Post' s readership, he is arguably the greatest American artist of all time.

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L'exposition sera inaugurée le 6 juin 2019 au Mémorial de Caen : 70 peintures de l'artiste Norman Rockwell, ainsi que des dessins, des esquisses préparatoires et des affiches. " L'exposition s'ouvrira sur la période de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, quand Rockwell soutenait l'effort de guerre américain, pour se terminer avec la Guerre du Vietnam marquée par le doute de l'artiste, et ses dernières peintures qui dénoncent le racisme aux Etats-Unis", explique Stéphane Grimaldi, Directeur du Mémorial de Caen.

L'artiste, mal connu du grand public en France, est pourtant l'un des illustrateurs les plus populaires aux Etats-Unis.
L'illustrateur de l'effort de guerre
Norman Rockwell est né à New York en 1894 à Stockbridge, dans l'Etat du Massachussetts. Grâce à ses prédispositions pour le dessin, il entre à l'Art Students League of New York. Il rêve de devenir illustrateur. Il devient célèbre en illustrant le magazine à grand tirage "The Saturday Evening Post" auquel il collabore de 1916 à 1963. Au total, il réalise 321 couvertures.

Dès l'entrée en guerre des Etats-Unis, à la fin de l'année 1941, ses dessins encouragent l'effort de guerre et en soulignent l'aspect humain avec des thèmes comme : le patriotisme, l'absence des proches ou encore le travail.

Sa série de tableaux "Les quatre libertés" au Mémorial de Caen
Norman Rockwell est mondialement connu pour sa série de tableaux "Les Quatre libertés". Il s'agit de quatre tableaux publiés au début de l'année 1943 dans le Saturday Evening Post.

Cette série est inspirée du discours de Franklin Roosevelt le 6 janvier 1941, dans lequel il énonce sa vision d'un avenir meilleur basé sur quatre libertés, à savoir la liberté de parole, la liberté de culte, la liberté de vivre à l'abri de la peur, et à l'abri du besoin.

La publication de ces tableaux fut un énorme succès aux Etats-Unis. Une tournée des tableaux fut organisée à travers les Etats-Unis, ce qui permit de collecter 130 millions de dollars pour l'effort de guerre. En 2019, ces tableaux connus de tous les Américains, rejoindront l'Europe pour la première fois, pour y être exposés au Mémorial de Caen.

Aujourd'hui, la plus grande collection des oeuvres de Norman Rockwell est visiblke au Norman Rockwell Museum, dans le Massachussetts, aux Etats-Unis.

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Qui est Norman Rockwell, exposé au Mémorial de Caen pour le 75ème anniversaire du Débarquement ?

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Ce sera l'exposition événement de 2019 : des tableaux et des dessins du peintre Norman Rockwell sortiront pour la première fois des Etats-Unis. Un artiste majeur, célèbre pour avoir illustré de 1916 à 1963 les couvertures du magazine Saturday Evening Post.

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CURRICULUM LAB Select your curriculum criteria from the filters below (grade, subject, theme, etc.). Then choose a lesson/activity by selecting an image.

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Engraving of the Four Freedoms at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Monday, January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:

Roosevelt delivered his speech 11 months before the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which caused the United States to declare war on Japan on December 8, 1941. The State of the Union speech before Congress was largely about the national security of the United States and the threat to other democracies from world war. In the speech, he made a break with the long-held tradition of United States non-interventionism. He outlined the U.S. role in helping allies already engaged in warfare, especially Great Britain and China.

In that context, he summarized the values of democracy behind the bipartisan consensus on international involvement that existed at the time. A famous quote from the speech prefaces those values: "As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone." In the second half of the speech, he lists the benefits of democracy, which include economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the promise of "adequate health care". The first two freedoms, of speech and religion, are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. His inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. Roosevelt endorsed a broader human right to economic security and anticipated what would become known decades later as the " human security" paradigm in studies of economic development. He also included the " freedom from fear" against national aggression and took it to the new United Nations he was setting up.

In the 1930s many Americans, arguing that the involvement in World War I had been a mistake, were adamantly against continued intervention in European affairs. With the Neutrality Acts established after 1935, U.S. law banned the sale of armaments to countries that were at war and placed restrictions on travel with belligerent vessels.

When World War II began in September 1939, the neutrality laws were still in effect and ensured that no substantial support could be given to Britain and France. With the revision of the Neutrality Act in 1939, Roosevelt adopted a "methods-short-of-war policy" whereby supplies and armaments could be given to European Allies, provided no declaration of war could be made and no troops committed. By December 1940, Europe was largely at the mercy of Adolf Hitler and Germany's Nazi regime. With Germany's defeat of France in June 1940, Britain and its overseas Empire stood alone against the military alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister of Britain, called for Roosevelt and the United States to supply them with armaments in order to continue with the war effort.[citation needed ]

The 1939 New York World's Fair had celebrated Four Freedoms - religion, speech, press, and assembly - and commissioned Leo Friedlander to create sculptures representing them. Mayor of New York City Fiorello La Guardia described the resulting statues as the "heart of the fair". Later Roosevelt would declare his own "Four Essential Freedoms" and call on Walter Russell to create a Four Freedoms Monument that was eventually dedicated at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

They also appeared on the reverse of the AM-lira, the Allied Military Currency note issue that was issued in Italy during WWII, by the Americans, that was in effect occupation currency, guaranteed by the American dollar.

The Four Freedoms Speech was given on January 6, 1941. Roosevelt's hope was to provide a rationale for why the United States should abandon the isolationist policies that emerged from World War I. In the address, Roosevelt critiqued Isolationism, saying: "No realistic American can expect from a dictator's peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion-or even good business. Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. 'Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.'"

The speech coincided with the introduction of the Lend-Lease Act, which promoted Roosevelt's plan to become the "arsenal of democracy" and support the Allies (mainly the British) with much-needed supplies. Furthermore, the speech established what would become the ideological basis for America's involvement in World War II, all framed in terms of individual rights and liberties that are the hallmark of American politics.

The speech delivered by President Roosevelt incorporated the following text, known as the "Four Freedoms":

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech, and expression-everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want-which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear-which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

-  Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941

The four freedoms flag or "United Nations Honor Flag" c. 1943-1948

later in the same speech the president went on to specify six basic goals:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

Jobs for those who can work.

Security for those who need it.

The ending of special privilege for the few.

The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

The declaration of the Four Freedoms as a justification for war would resonate through the remainder of the war, and for decades longer as a frame of remembrance. The Freedoms became the staple of America's war aims and the center of all attempts to rally public support for the war. With the creation of the Office of War Information (1942), as well as the famous paintings by Norman Rockwell, the Freedoms were advertised as values central to American life and examples of American exceptionalism.

The Four Freedoms Speech was popular, and the goals were influential in postwar politics. However, in 1941 the speech received heavy criticism from anti-war elements. Critics argued that the Four Freedoms were simply a charter for Roosevelt's New Deal, social reforms that had already created sharp divisions within Congress. Conservatives who opposed social programs and increased government intervention argued against Roosevelt's attempt to justify and depict the war as necessary for the defense of lofty goals.

While the Freedoms did become a forceful aspect of American thought on the war, they were never the exclusive justification for the war. Polls and surveys conducted by the United States Office of War Information (OWI) revealed that self-defense and vengeance for the attack on Pearl Harbor were still the most prevalent reasons for war.

The concept of the Four Freedoms became part of the personal mission undertaken by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948. She helped inspire the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, General Assembly Resolution 217A. Indeed, these Four Freedoms were explicitly incorporated into the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads: " Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy the freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed the highest aspiration of the common people."

FDR called for "a world-wide reduction of armaments" as a goal for "the future days, which we seek to make secure" but one that was "attainable in our own time and generation." More immediately, though, he called for a massive build-up of U.S. arms production:

Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world ... The need of the moment is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily-almost exclusively-to meeting this foreign peril. ... [T]he immediate need is a swift and driving increase in our armament production. ... I also ask this Congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations.

In a 1942 radio address, President Roosevelt declared the Four Freedoms embodied "rights of men of every creed and every race, wherever they live." On February 19, 1942, he authorized Japanese American internment with Executive Order 9066. It allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded". This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, except for those in internment camps. By 1946, the United States had incarcerated 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent, of whom about 80,000 had been born in the United States.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is a park designed by the architect Louis Kahn for the south point of Roosevelt Island. The park celebrates the famous speech, and text from the speech is inscribed on a granite wall in the final design of the park.

The Roosevelt Institute honors outstanding individuals who have demonstrated a lifelong commitment to these ideals. The Four Freedoms Award medals are awarded at ceremonies at Hyde Park, New York and Middelburg, Netherlands during alternate years. The awards were first presented in 1982 on the centenary of President Roosevelt's birth as well as the bicentenary of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Netherlands.

Among the laureates have been:

John Crowley's novel Four Freedoms (2009) is largely based on the themes of Roosevelt's speech.

FDR commissioned sculptor Walter Russell to design a monument to be dedicated to the first hero of the war. The Four Freedoms Monument was created in 1941 and dedicated at Madison Square Garden, in New York City, in 1943.

Artist Kindred McLeary painted America the Mighty (1941), also known as Defense of Human Freedoms, in the State Department's Harry S. Truman Building.

Artist Hugo Ballin painted The Four Freedoms mural (1942) in the Council Chamber of the City Hall of Burbank, California.

New Jersey muralist Michael Lenson (1903-1972) painted The Four Freedoms mural (1943) for the Fourteenth Street School in Newark, New Jersey.

Muralist Anton Refregier painted the History of San Francisco murals (completed 1948) in the Rincon Center in San Francisco, California; panel 27 depicts the four freedoms.

Artist Mildred Nungester Wolfe painted a four-panel Four Freedoms mural (complete 1959) depicting the four freedoms for a country store in Richton, Mississippi. Those panels now hang in the Mississippi Museum of Art.

Allyn Cox painted four Four Freedoms murals (completed 1982) that hang in the Great Experiment Hall in the United States House of Representatives; each of the four panels depicts allegorical figures representing the four freedoms.

Since 1986, the fictional Four Freedoms Plaza has served as the headquarters for Marvel Comics superhero team Fantastic Four.

In the early 1990s, artist David McDonald reproduced Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings as four large murals on the side of an old grocery building in downtown Silverton, Oregon.

In 2008, Florida International University's Wolfsonian museum hosted the Thoughts on Democracy exhibition that displayed posters created by 60 leading contemporary artists and designers, invited to create a new graphic design inspired by American illustrator Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms posters.

Norman Rockwell's paintings

Roosevelt's speech inspired a set of four paintings by Norman Rockwell.

The members of the set, known collectively as The Four Freedoms, were published in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post. The four paintings subsequently were displayed around the US by the United States Department of the Treasury.

Each painting was published with a matching essay on that particular "Freedom":

Postage stamps

Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings were reproduced as postage stamps by the United States Post Office in 1943, in 1946, and in 1994, the centenary of Rockwell's birth.

Borgwardt, Elizabeth. "FDR's Four Freedoms as a Human Rights Instrument." OAH Magazine of History 22.2 (2008): 8-13. extract

Crowell, Laura. "The building of the 'four freedoms' speech." Communications Monographs 22.5 (1955): 266-283.

De Zayas, Alfred. "The Relevance of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms Today." -62 Nordic Journal of International Law 61 (1992): 239+.

Dunn, Susan, A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days That Mobilized America (2018) pp 73-101.

Engel, Jeffrey A., ed. The four freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the evolution of an American idea (Oxford University Press, 2015); argues that Roosevelt's speech left a deep imprint in America, but the society largely failed to achieve his vision of freedom, p. 7. online review

Gutierrez, Robert. "The Four Freedoms Viewed in Comparison to Traditional American Political Ideals." Counterpoints, vol. 271, 2007, pp. 33-40. online

Inazu, John D. "The Four Freedoms and the Future of Religious Liberty." North Carolina Law Review 92 (2013): 787+ online.

Johnstone, Andrew. Against Immediate Evil: American Internationalists and the Four Freedoms on the Eve of World War II (Cornell University Press, 2015).

Kaye, Harvey J. The fight for four freedoms: what made FDR and the greatest generation truly great (Simon and Schuster, 2014); 8 essays by scholars. online

Posneer, Michael H. P"The Four Freedoms Turn 70: Embracing an Integrated Approach to Human Rights." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) vol. 105, 2011, pp. 27-31. online

Rhodes, Jesse H. "The Evolution of Roosevelt's Rhetorical Legacy: Presidential Rhetoric about Rights in Domestic and Foreign Affairs, 1933‐2011." Presidential Studies Quarterly 43.3 (2013): 562-591. online

Shulman, Mark R. "The four freedoms: Good neighbors make good law and good policy in a time of insecurity." Fordham Law Review 77 (2008): 555-581 online.

WESLEY, CHARLES H., et al. "THE NEGRO HAS ALWAYS WANTED THE FOUR FREEDOMS." in What the Negro Wants, edited by Rayford W. Logan, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) pp. 90-112. online

Rockwell's icons

Kimble, James J. "The illustrated four freedoms: FDR, Rockwell, and the margins of the rhetorical presidency." Presidential Studies Quarterly 45.1 (2015): 46-69.

Lynch III, Sylvio. Morality and Aspiration: Some Conditions of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms (PhD Diss. Bowling Green State University, 2020) online

Murray, Stuart, James McCabe, and John Frohnmayer. Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms: Images that Inspire a Nation (Berkshire House, 1993) online.

Olson, Lester G. "Portraits in praise of a people: A rhetorical analysis of Norman Rockwell's icons in Franklin D. Roosevelt's "four freedoms" campaign." Quarterly Journal of Speech 69.1 (1983): 15-24.

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The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Monday, January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy: Roosevelt delivered his speech 11 months before the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which caused the United States to declare war on Japan on December 8, 1941.

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Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms

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Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms

In the spring of 1942, Norman Rockwell was working on a piece commissioned by the Ordnance Department of the US Army, a painting of a machine gunner in need of ammunition.

Posters featuring Let's Give Him Enough and On Time were distributed to munitions factories throughout the country to encourage production. But Rockwell wanted to do more for the war effort and determined to illustrate Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. Finding new ideas for paintings never came easily, but this was a greater challenge.

While considering his options, Rockwell by chance attended a town meeting where a Vermont neighbor was met with respect when he rose among his neighbors to voice an unpopular view. That night he awoke with the realization that he could best paint the Four Freedoms from the perspective of his own experiences, using everyday scenes as his guide. Rockwell made some sketches and, accompanied by fellow Saturday Evening Post artist Mead Schaeffer, went to Washington to propose his ideas.

As was his complex, customary process, the artist's thumbnail drawings and large scale charcoal sketches, no longer extant, were followed by preliminary color studies in oil before he finished his paintings seven months later. Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear were clearly conceptualized in his mind from the start, but Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Worship presented greater challenges. For each painting, he carefully choreographed the expressions and poses of each of his chosen models, and worked closely with his studio assistant Gene Pelham to photograph them for future reference. Freedom of Worship was initially set in a barber shop with people of different faiths and races chatting amiably and waiting their turn, a notion that Rockwell ultimately rejected as stereotypical. For Freedom of Speech, he experimented with several different vantage points, including two that engulfed the speaker in the crowd. In the final work, the speaker stands heads and shoulders above the observers, the clear center of attention.

In April 1943, one month after their appearance in the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell's original paintings began a sixteen-city Four Freedoms War Bond Show tour to publicize the Second War Loan Drive. The U.S. Treasury Department, realizing their potential to generate revenue through the sale of war bonds and to boost public morale, partnered with the Post to sponsor the tour.

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Home | Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms

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In the spring of 1942, Norman Rockwell was working on a piece commissioned by the Ordnance Department of the US Army, a painting of a machine gunner in need of ammunition. Posters featuring Let's Give Him Enough and On Time were distributed to munitions factories throughout the country to encourage production.

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Norman Rockwell Museum - The Home for American Illustration

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Norman Rockwell Museum presents the world’s largest collection of original Norman Rockwell art as the best of American illustration.