Rockwell had performed his first few assignments so well that he was working steadily for the magazine in early 1913, operating as art editor as well as illustrating several of each issue’s stories. The part-time job left him free to pursue plenty of other commissions, and the $50 a month that Boys’ Life paid him allowed him to refuse the occasional unappealing job. By the time he left the magazine in June 1917, he had personally provided over four hundred illustrations. The early drawings for Boys’ Life are generally romantically rendered, evincing strong line but soft focus, elevating by their technical mastery the often plebeian stories they interpret. Howard Pyle hovers over many of the pieces, and even, at times, Pyle’s brilliant student, N. C. Wyeth. Rockwell ordinarily distanced himself from Wyeth, implying that unlike the Chadds Ford acolyte, he remained his own man.
Rockwell’s position in 1913 as art editor of Boys’ Life pegged him as a specialist in illustrating American boyhood, then a lucrative foothold in the commercial world. But if the potential financial security was reason to celebrate, the effect on Rockwell’s psyche was more equivocal, and he knew it. To some extent, the Boys’ Life job seemed to paralyze him into a permanent romance with childhood. The boy he had wanted to be, the guys he admired, the ones who got mistreated, the bullies, the lads clearly nurtured in the most ideal family settings—such themes reappeared over the next six decades, as if playing out a scene that he was determined to get right. His dissatisfaction with his childhood became the substance of his adult success, as he painted from his memories, often transforming the dross into golden scenes from an imaginary past. It is no accident that even in his old age, a word used commonly to describe his charm was boyish.
Since he was fourteen years old, Rockwell had believed that financial security would afford him greater self-esteem. Now, as his own professional efforts enabled his family to move into a far more respectable residence, he began to relax into a more secure public image. The shift to tony New Rochelle, New York, massaged Rockwell’s bruised ego. Only a few miles from familiar Mamaroneck, New Rochelle’s aura of gentility and nature, of wilderness civilized, bestowed a sophistication on the community that its homier companion town lacked. Yet it determinedly clung to the local traditions that made it a place people returned to: between Huguenot and Main streets, for instance, a “most courtly Italian” roasted coffee at his popular shop; within easy walking distance of that stop stood Kerwin’s drugstore, Pete Donnelly’s restaurant, Charlie McGurk’s saloon, and even Coles Phillips’s studio in Sutton Manor. Ware’s department store, Hyman Frost’s clothing store, the National City Bank, Eddie Cordial’s laundry, the YMCA, Ed Carson’s jewelry store, and Chappie’s barbershop were their neighbors.
Directly bordering Long Island Sound, the lively city of thirty-five thousand had developed nine miles of waterfront into private and public beaches peppered with often luxurious homes. Seven public parks, 132 miles of paved public streets, six banks, a dozen social clubs, and, most of all, its status as having the highest per capita wealth in the state of New York were all statistics trumpeted by the local realtors. Undoubtedly of special interest to Nancy Rockwell, convinced even before her genuine medical crisis of a near daily new threat to her health, New Rochelle enjoyed the lowest mortality rate in the state as well. Balancing its determination to be contemporary with a Yankee attention to tradition, the city was solidified by moneyed stability. According to Tom Hochtor, the nonagenerian town historian, New Rochelle “hasn’t changed all that much since Rockwell lived here. Unlike those places whose populations just exploded after the world wars, New Rochelle got touched gently—more people, but not dramatically so. And the way of life pretty much evolved slowly, so the changes just don’t seem so big as they are elsewhere.”
For Rockwell, New Rochelle’s éclat stemmed from its repository of famous artists. Not only Coles Phillips resided locally; an enclave of celebrity illustrators and cartoonists who wanted to live outside of but conveniently close to Manhattan chose the lush city for their home, among them Clare Briggs, Victor Clyde Forsythe, and best of all, Frank and Joseph (J. C.) Leyendecker. Rockwell met the New Rochelle clique quickly, since his own profile was sharpening monthly. Of them all, J. C. Leyendecker impressed him the most.
Joseph Leyendecker was high on Rockwell’s list of heroes; his technical virtuosity, his range of styles, his narrative intelligence, all contributed to make him probably the best living illustrator, at least in Rockwell’s opinion. Several of the Boys’ Life charcoal sketches show Leyendecker’s ghostly traces in the elongated, elegant human figures, precise drawing, and modern thematic treatment of stories. Leyendecker’s first Post cover, the May 20, 1899, black-and-white drawing based on a Spanish-American War story, had been exactly the type of picture Waring enjoyed sharing with young Norman and Jarvis, so proud of their little military battalion at St. Luke’s. By the time Leyendecker’s second cover was published in 1903, Rockwell was working alongside Waring, copying illustrations from popular magazines. J. C. Leyendecker would complete 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, exactly the number that would prove the end-stop for his younger friend in 1963. During that decade, Rockwell would answer a student’s letter about Leyendecker’s influence on the younger illustrator this way: “Apart from my admiration for his technique, his painting, his character and his diligence, he didn’t have that much impact upon my work.”
Leyendecker’s talent was prodigious, especially his adroitness in shifting from one style to another. Particularly strong in drawing and composition, he created black-and-white sketches whose crisp execution inspired the sharper lines that appeared in Rockwell’s illustrations for Boys’ Life as of 1916. Leyendecker’s Arrow Shirt ads, which practically created single-handedly the look of the Roaring Twenties young man, combined elegance of line with a slight narrative superiority indicated in his characters’ barely perceptible aloofness, a technique Rockwell admired but did not emulate. Leyendecker’s careful but broad brushstroke was employed in the most masterful of color compositions, including ads such as the 1900 Rogers and Company printing service, with the rigorously drawn, glorious reference to Michelangelo’s Adam, and the 1917 Kellogg’s Corn Flakes ad in which a Dutch Masters–inspired little girl far exceeds the demands of the occasion. Her luminous skin and the glorification of the domestic deliberately refer to an age when lavishing painterly skill on a child at breakfast was considered a legitimate enterprise among the very best artists.
In moving to the same town as the luminary Leyendecker, Rockwell and other illustrators could join forces and reassure each other that they weren’t being written out of the history of art. Change, it was clear, radical change, was in the air—too rarefied for Rockwell to breathe easily. Oddly neglected in Rockwell’s accounts of this year, just as he was making his bid to enter America’s professional art world, the 69th Regiment Armory Show, an exhibition of over sixteen hundred pieces of American and European modern painting and sculpture, was being set up in New York City. February 17, the momentous opening date recorded in the consciousness of all art students of the period, came two weeks after Rockwell’s nineteenth birthday, and within five days of John Fleming Wilson’s debaucheries in Brooklyn. The first large-scale exhibit of contemporary art, including several notorious pieces by Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, drew record crowds during its one-month New York run, and even larger numbers attended the smaller, edited show mounted afterward at the Chicago Art Institute. Artists and lay audiences alike could no longer avoid the new definitions of art contesting the age-old academic emphasis on representation. The picture plane could never again be taken for granted, and the subjectivity of the artist crowded other aesthetic priorities.
The Armory Show actually highlighted the broad spectrum of Provincetown talent: Oliver Chaffee, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Abraham Walkowitz, and Marguerite and William Zorach represented their own versions of what they thought modern art should be. Rockwell was right to realize that in theory, at least, he could
join their ranks—if he would take the risk. At his own school during this period, Rockwell observed the League’s “inner circle,” the Fakirs, parodying Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. This highly social group, self-appointed art students who deflated the stuffy or the self-important, orchestrated their riotous annual year-end ball even more gleefully than usual in light of the changes clearly overtaking the art world. Parades and costume balls abounded, but Rockwell, in spite of his theatrical leanings, refused to budge from his work schedule. “They knocked on my [studio] door and I wouldn’t answer,” he later admitted. It was against this fevered panorama of expectations and excitement (League students were still fervently debating the Armory Show two months after it closed) that Rockwell urged his family to relocate to New Rochelle after Father Rockwell died in March, liberating Waring from any responsibilities for allaying the old man’s loneliness.
In New Rochelle, the family moved into Brown’s Lodge, owned by a lady reduced in circumstances, a “family hotel” that tried to blend the reassuring values of the past with awareness of contemporary culture. Its earnest attention to decorum relieved Norman’s anxieties. The boardinghouse organized the floors so that “young people” lived on a separate level from their parents’ apartments, an arrangement that encouraged unmarried single men and women to continue living at “home,” assuaging the guilt of parents who would rather pay others to create such an inviting domestic atmosphere than to do so themselves. Nancy and Waring promptly joined St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, but this time Norman opted out. By 1913, he’d had enough religion for a lifetime. He’d acquiesced all the way through last spring’s confirmation. Now, though still deferential to his parents in most things, the nineteen-year-old began to assert himself as his own man in matters such as religion, albeit proceeding cautiously as he did so. He disliked hurting people, even when he disagreed deeply with their values or behavior.
According to various articles in the New Rochelle newspapers, Brown’s enjoyed an even more substantial reputation than Rockwell acknowledged, functioning much like today’s upscale apartment complex. The boardinghouse even included several dining rooms where local clubs—Kiwanis, Rotary, and church groups—held monthly meetings. Rockwell’s life at Brown’s afforded him the first rewards for being considered a man of good prospects. Not even twenty years old, he was earning the early-twenty-first-century equivalent of $860 a month from Boys’ Life alone, an annual salary of $10,320. He began to squire various girls around town and polished his natural friendliness into a more suave but still accessible version that appealed to women.
But though Rockwell quickly developed cordial, even affectionate relationships, he usually implied more intimacy to those involved than he really felt. He procured studio space, for instance, at 360 North Avenue in the Clovelly building, next door to a brusque, good willed woman who ran the Tatler, a gossip rag for the city. The two struck up a friendship, and Rockwell tried to guide her to a less defensive stance that would net her easier social acceptance among New Rochelle’s elite. Describing her years later, in spite of the warm friendship they’d shared, Rockwell nonetheless discharged her in short order, explaining that she was snubbed because her father was a butcher, motivating her to turn catty. The digression was necessary for him to get to the important point of their fortuitous (and fortunate) acquaintance, as far as he was concerned: when she went out of business, he was able to rent her office and knock down a wall to enlarge his studio space.
While his brother’s reputation grew, Jarvis set out in his own directions. Continuing to act in the amateur theatrics he had begun three years earlier at St. Thomas’s, he also discovered new ways to exploit his athleticism. He enjoyed beating his brother in tennis matches, especially since Norman, no mean player himself, at least had a chance against Jarvis in this sport, by virtue of now being three inches taller than the older boy, as well as possessing a much leaner body. Jarvis was still clearly the athlete of the family. During the summer of 1913, he took advantage of New Rochelle’s proximity to the water and began racing, somehow even managing to buy his own boat. He entered his dory, the Rocky, in the Orienta Yacht Club’s regatta in August, but just as he positioned himself in second place, a dangerous squall struck, capsizing every boat but his. The newspaper account comments on the able rescue of the four other boats and their crew; Jarvis Rockwell alone, however, true to his brother’s memories of his physical prowess, rode out the squall in safety, “being driven clear across the Sound” and arriving home late that evening.
The younger son was getting his share of attention too. In March 1914, the Tatler published the first known interview with Norman Rockwell. Rarely noticed by later critics searching for the illustrator’s motivations or aesthetics, the startling article follows in the wake of Rockwell’s summer at Provincetown: his involvement with John Fleming Wilson, the three-month depression and recovery, the brief reconnoiter with Wilson again, followed by the move to New Rochelle. In the period between arriving at Brown’s and this interview, Rockwell had spent his time painting or sketching a variety of subjects, and in an impressive span of styles. His answers to his interviewer, however, belie the turbulence and variety of the previous eighteen months, making it sound as though the artist was fixated on a regimen of boys and animals. In fact, he was responding to feeling hemmed in by his Boys’ Life job, which consisted of too much administration and too many “children only” illustrations. He was beginning to feel trivialized as an artist and was scared of getting his wings clipped before he had left the ground.
To his interviewer’s question “Do you like illustration work?” the twenty-year-old “tall, thin figure . . . [with] a big bass drum laugh” responded: “No, I hate it. It’s so cramped.” He explains by way of complaining that, for instance, in his current assignment, he is yet again forced to draw a baseball diamond, and that in spite of trying it from every possible new angle he can imagine, there is not much new he can think to do with it. And yet, “as long as authors continue to write baseball stories and as long as little boys continue to read them, I suppose I will have to draw them.” Asked “why don’t you give up illustration?” he responds, “I’m not big enough I suppose, and figuratively speaking the children must have shoes.” (The children, presumably, were his parents, whom he had certainly begun helping financially by this point.)
Rockwell continues candidly discussing the ways he might escape from his current field and strike out into new painterly directions: “I intended giving up illustration this winter and going to Norway for several months and studying the Norwegian and the Swedish painters, but my contracts interfered and my work piled up, so that it looks as if I wouldn’t get off before spring, if I am able to get away then.” Norway? Since this is the only such reference Rockwell will ever make, at least publicly, we can do no more than conjecture what he was thinking. Most likely, Charles Hawthorne’s open admiration for the turn-of-the-century Norwegian genre painting that emphasized fishing and farming suggested the itinerary to the Provincetown devotee.
The line of teachers under whom Rockwell had studied, from Chase to Bridgman to Hawthorne, represented the influences of the Düsseldorf and Munich schools, the first encouraging the Hudson River School’s attention to meticulous detail and high finish, the other urging more attention to color and brushstroke, with the painters of choice Rubens, Hals, and Velázquez. The German schools motivated a turn to the homey and domestic, and many of the students under their sway found their way to the north, to Norway and Sweden, where they resided in fishing and farming villages ready-made for such a painterly emphasis. Here the painters of the late nineteenth century, Rockwell’s teachers, could explore narrative painting, learning to create theatrical vignettes out of the everyday life of the villagers. Lured by such tales, as well as by more recent trips to lands north by Art Students League members including Rockwell Kent, whose name had already caused others to confuse the two men, the young illustrator was obviously considering what it would mean to follow
their paths.
In addition, Edvard Munch hailed from Norway; he was a painter who represented solutions to Rockwell’s two major problems: a tendency to tighten up in his painting and its emotional correlative—a lack of spontaneity. The Norwegian painter effected moving, disturbing paintings with a very loose, expressive style that remained realistic as opposed to abstract. Conceptually, Munch painted the everyday men and women of his time, like Rockwell, and did not overly embellish or dramatize; yet his figures are haunting. In general, Norwegian and Swedish painters were associated with a more dramatic, gloomy content than other artists; and Rockwell had become increasingly concerned that he was getting trapped into children’s art. Seeking out its opposite was in many respects a logical idea.
But most surprising of all, the pragmatic Rockwell, who rarely theorized about life or art, philosophized about why he might redirect his life so dramatically: “The trouble is you only have one life and you might just as well take the risk of making a success or failure at the thing you want to do, as to make a partial but sure success of the thing you don’t like to do.” He hastened to smooth over any hurt feelings his apparent disloyalty might have caused: “Not that there isn’t a big field for illustration and not that there aren’t great illustrators; for example, I am a great admirer of Howard Pyle’s work. Of course, he is dead now, but he had the power to make his illustrations absorb the atmosphere of the story, you know.” This may well be the only record of Norman Rockwell suggesting that he wanted something more than being a great illustrator—and that he feared he wasn’t good enough to make it as a fine artist.
Norman Rockwell Page 16