American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
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FOR THE BOYS—KENT, ELI, AND LEO SEPKOWITZ
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton
CONTENTS
Frontispiece
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Welcome to Rockwell Land
1. The Bird Man of Yonkers (1830 to 1888)
2. Not a Norman Rockwell Childhood (1894 to 1911)
3. The Art Students League (September 1911 to 1912)
4. The Boy Scouts Versus the Armory Show (September 1912 to December 1913)
5. New Rochelle, Art Capital of the World (1914 to 1916)
6. Irene O’Connor, or Uncle Sam Wants You (1916 to 1918)
7. Billy Payne (May 1919 to Summer 1920)
8. Miss America (1922 to 1923)
9. The Arrow Collar Man (1924 to 1925)
10. Divorce (1926 to 1929)
11. Mary Barstow (Spring 1930 to September 1932)
12. The New Deal (1933 to 1935)
13. Hello Life (Fall 1936 to 1938)
14. Arlington, Vermont (November 1938 to Summer 1942)
15. The Four Freedoms (May 1942 to May 1943)
16. “Slowly Fell the Picket Fence” (June 1943 to Summer 1947)
17. “We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw” (October 1948)
18. Grandma Moses (1948 to 1949)
19. Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950 to 1953)
20. The Age of Erik Erikson (1954)
21. Crack-Up (1955)
22. Young Man Luther (1957 to 1959)
23. Rockwell Tells His Life Story (1959)
24. Widowhood, or The Golden Rule (1960)
25. Meet Molly (1961)
26. Rockwell Departs from the Post (1962 to 1963)
27. Ruby Bridges (1964)
28. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Art Critic (1964 to 1967)
29. The Vietnam War (1965 to 1967)
30. Alice’s Restaurant (1967)
31. Andy Warhol & Company (Fall 1968)
32. The Brooklyn Museum (1969 to 1972)
33. “But I Want to Go to My Studio” (1972 to 1978)
Photo Insert
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Deborah Solomon
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Endpapers
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Endpapers: Rockwell’s letter to his assistant Franklin Lischke (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Triple Self-Portrait, 1961 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Rockwell wrote out this joke about an elephant and gave it to a psychiatrist.
Rockwell wondered if he inherited his drawing skill from his grandfather, Howard Hill, creator of Family of Grouse in a Landscape.
Mary Ann Rockwell, the artist’s mother, later known as Nancy
Norman and his older brother, Jarvis, display frogs caught during one of their summers in Warwick, New York. Although Norman was taller than Jarvis, he claimed to feel physically outmatched by him.
George Bridgman’s drawing class at the Art Students League in the fall of 1912 (Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York)
This charcoal drawing remains Rockwell’s earliest known work. He intended it as an illustration of a scene in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village.” (Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York)
Rockwell’s first published book illustration showed the explorer Samuel de Champlain on the rocks of Quebec.
With its striped swimming trunks and cropped legs, Rockwell’s Boys’ Life cover, from August 1915, strips away moldy detail in favor of modern spareness. (Courtesy of the National Scouting Museum, Irving, Texas)
A scout named Gailey is ridiculed for bringing pink pajamas to camp in this 1913 illustration, which Rockwell drew for Edward Cave’s Boy Scout Camp Book.
The illustrator Charles Dana Gibson specialized in images of busty women with big hair.
The Magic Football (“I thought you were wrong”) ran as a story illustration in St. Nicholas, the best of the children’s magazines, in December 1914. The medium is oil on canvas en grisaille.
James Montgomery Flagg inserted his own face into his portrait of Uncle Sam in his Army recruiting poster of 1916. He was influenced by the British poster of Lord Kitchener created by Alfred Leete.
The Clubhouse Examination, 1917, riffed on James Montgomery Flagg’s recruiting poster.
During his stint in the Navy, Rockwell received permission to continue painting magazine covers—so long as he portrayed sailors.
Billy Payne’s best friend, Eddie Carson, posed for a Boy Scouts recruiting poster, which also ran as the cover of the July 1919 issue of Boys’ Life. (Courtesy of the National Scouting Museum, Irving, Texas)
Rockwell poses with his model Billy Payne, circa 1917.
Boy with Dog in Picnic Basket ran on the May 15, 1920, cover of The Saturday Evening Post and amounts to a tender elegy for a boy who fell to his death.
Rockwell dressed up as a Spanish matador for a costume party in April 1920, with his wife, Irene. (Photograph by Paul Thompson)
Irene Rockwell seldom modeled for Rockwell and made one of her few appearances on the cover of a 1921 issue of The Literary Digest.
No Swimming, 1921: One of Rockwell’s most famous paintings has less to do with putting on a costume than taking it off.
The Arrow Collar Man, as created by J. C. Leyendecker, was selling not just a shirt but the promise of urban sophistication. This advertisement appeared in 1912.
On a visit to Clyde Forsythe in Southern California, Rockwell is introduced to the actor Charles “Buddy” Rogers, a silent film star. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Doctor and Doll, 1929, acknowledges Rockwell’s affection for Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Norman and Mary in Los Angeles, on March 19, 1930, the day they applied for a marriage license
Fred Hildebrandt took pictures of Rockwell on their treks through the San Gabriel Mountains. (Courtesy of Alexandra Hoy)
Fred Hildebrandt took pictures of Rockwell on their treks through the San Gabriel Mountains. (Courtesy of Alexandra Hoy)
Fred Hildebrandt, an artist, worked as Rockwell’s studio assistant and model for a decade. (Courtesy of Gary Hallwood)
Colonial Couple, 1931 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Rockwell shows off a moose head outside his cabin at the Segouin camp in Quebec, where he was assisted by two French-speaking guides. (Photograph by Fred Hildebrandt; courtesy of Alexandra Hoy)
An illustration for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer harks back to the tragedy of Billy Payne.
The Ticket Agent, 1937
Mary Rockwell, her three sons, and an unidentified girl aboard the SS Bremen, en route to London, March 1938 (Courtesy of Jarvis Rockwell)
Blank Canvas, 1938 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Freedom of Speech, 1942 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Freedom of Worship, 1942 (Norman Rockwell Museum, St
ockbridge, Massachusetts)
Freedom from Fear, 1942 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
My Studio Burns, 1943, relayed news of a catastrophe as so many charming vignettes.
Rosie the Riveter (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas) riffed on Michelangelo’s figure of Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Rosie the Riveter (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas) riffed on Michelangelo’s figure of Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
The Rockwell family: Norman, Mary, Jerry, Tommy, Peter, and Raleigh, circa 1940
The Rockwell and Schaeffer families socializing in Arlington, Vermont
Homecoming G.I. was used by the federal government to help promote the final War Loan Drive.
Rockwell’s new dog, a springer spaniel named Butch, appeared in Going and Coming. This is a charcoal sketch for the painting. (Collection of George Lucas)
The Famous Twelve in 1949: Fred Ludekens, Al Dorne, Norman Rockwell, Peter Helck, Al Parker, Jon Whitcomb, Stevan Dohanos, Ben Stahl, Austin Briggs, Harold von Schmidt, Robert Fawcett, and John Atherton (Courtesy of the Famous Artists School)
Rockwell displays his Christmas card designs to Joyce C. Hall, on February 14, 1948, in Kansas City. (Courtesy of Hallmark Cards)
Christmas Homecoming, the defining image of holiday togetherness, appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on December 25, 1948.
Rockwell with his friend Joe Mugnaini, a teacher at Otis College of Art and Design
The New Television Set, 1949 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles)
Rockwell decorates a cake for Grandma Moses’s eighty-ninth birthday in 1949. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Rockwell and Mary in his studio. With its knotty-pine walls and a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel’s The Peasant Dance hanging over the mantelpiece, the studio was more elaborately decorated than his home. (TOP: photograph by Arthur Johnson; BOTTOM: photograph by Bill Scovill, courtesy of the Famous Artists School)
When the Post did a survey asking readers to name their favorite Rockwell cover, Saying Grace won hands-down. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
The Shiner, 1954, stands with Rosie the Riveter as a protofeminist representation of female strength. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Erik Erikson, soon after he moved to Stockbridge, in his yard (Photograph by Clemens Kalischer)
Girl at Mirror, 1954 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Breaking Home Ties, 1954 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Art Critic, 1955 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Rockwell socializing with Erik Erikson and other members of the Marching and Chowder Society, circa 1960
Before the Shot, 1958 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
The Runaway, 1958 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
The Golden Rule, 1961 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Norman and Molly Rockwell, photographed in 1962 by his assistant Bill Scovill
Rockwell reads a toast to Erik Erikson on March 31, 1962, at a dinner for the Berkshire Art Center. Molly is on Rockwell’s right, Joan Erikson is on his left, and Peggy Best, who organized the event, is sitting to the left foreground, back to camera. (Courtesy of Jonathan Best)
The Problem We All Live With, which appeared as a two-page spread in Look magazine on January 14, 1964, remains the single most famous painting of the civil rights movement. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With echoes a news photograph of Ruby Bridges being escorted from school by U.S. deputy marshals. (Courtesy of AP)
After seeing Peter Hurd’s portrait of him, LBJ denounced it and decided retroactively that he liked Rockwell’s earlier portrait of him.
Rockwell painted Stockbridge—Main Street at Christmas in 1967, after Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” made its radio debut on WBAI-FM. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Al Kooper, Norman Rockwell, and Mike Bloomfield (Photograph by Bob Cato; courtesy of Al Kooper)
In 1968 Rockwell provided the portrait for the album jacket of The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. (Courtesy of Al Kooper)
Rockwell’s last painting portrays a scene from local history, and brings together a missionary and an Indian.
COLOR INSERT
1 Boy with Baby Carriage, 1916, was Rockwell’s first cover for The Saturday Evening Post. Billy Payne posed for all three boys. (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
2 Gary Cooper as The Texan, 1930 (Collection of Steven Spielberg)
3 Movie Starlet and Reporters, 1936 (Collection of Steven Spielberg)
4 Freedom from Want, 1943 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
5 Tattoo Artist, 1944 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York)
6 Shuffleton’s Barbershop, 1950 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
7 Marriage License, 1955 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
8 The Connoisseur, 1962 (Collection of Steven Spielberg)
INTRODUCTION: WELCOME TO ROCKWELL LAND
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 five hundred years of subject matter—from languid Madonnas and racked saints to tabletops laden with curvy fruit—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 twentieth 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 Goog 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.
I first wrote about Rockwell in 1999, in an article for The New York Times Magazine.1 The day after it was published, Jarvis Rockwell, an artist himself, called me up out of the blue and mentioned that a serious biography of his father remained to be written. I had written biographies of Jackson Pollock and Joseph Cornell, members of the American avant-garde whose work embodied the romance of New York bohemia at midcentury. I decided to write this book because I was curious about the part of American culture that did not unfurl in Greenwich Village or represent the counterculture, about the part that lies beyond (some would say beneath) the official story of art.
To be sure, the ba
sic outlines of his life have been visible at least since 1960, when, with the help of his writer-son Thomas Rockwell, he published his autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator. Through no fault of Tom’s, who assembled the book from a series of anecdotes his father recorded on a Dictaphone, the omissions are fairly enormous. Although Rockwell offers lengthy descriptions of his Navy buddies and his acquaintances at a New York boardinghouse, such as the pseudonymous middle-aged women who came to meals in their bathrobes and hairnets and never failed to raise hell about specks of dirt on the silverware, he barely mentions his marriages, his politics, his psychiatrists, or his constant treks to Southern California. He forgets to mention when people close to him, including his wives, die. And, perhaps out of modesty, he doesn’t see fit to discuss the meaning of his work.
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 eighteenth 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. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students appreciate 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.
Which is not to suggest that Rockwell was a man with an overtly political agenda, a Thomas Jefferson with a paintbrush, contriving to improve the character of our national life. His political sensibility was elusive and lay dormant for decades. He first registered to vote in 1926, with the Republican Party. It was the era of Calvin Coolidge, who is linked to only one famous comment (“The business of America is business”). In those days the Republican Party stood for moderation. This heightens the poignancy of Rockwell’s transformation, decades later, into a man who championed nuclear disarmament, voted for Lyndon Johnson for president, and produced the single most memorable painting to emerge from the civil rights movement.