Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  This divide between the cognoscenti and the untutored American masses would only deepen throughout the twentieth century. The Westchester County newspapers’ relief at the famous painter Norman Rockwell’s affability and accessibility—his personality seeming to mimic his audience-friendly art—anticipated the future, when Rockwell’s work would become a symbol for a middle-class, often well-educated audience that felt itself scorned for its aesthetic preferences. That members of the professional ranks comprising the intelligentsia of 1950 would feel compelled to hide their love of Rockwell is no surprise; that suburban journalists in the early 1920s were already defensively detailing his virtues as a normal versus “different” artist sets the tone from the beginning of his career for the ambivalent reception that would span it.

  A subtext of confusion over exactly what and how to consider Rockwell—as “just” an illustrator or as an artist—also fueled the early interviews that protectively lauded the painter’s ordinariness. Most full-time illustrators, for instance, couldn’t take enough time off from work to stay out all night like the Greenwich Village “types” the journalists scourged—and among whom Rockwell would have enjoyed a party or two himself. In 1920, in addition to his eleven covers for the Post, Rockwell published six covers for the second most popular American magazine, Life. Two of them show Rockwell developing the same idea, but in such radically different visual terms that the viewer can only laud the stylistic difference. Life’s July 1 cover, Carrying On, depends upon a triangular arrangement of a young father, mother, and baby backed by an inverted triangular figure of a soldier running forward, bayonet and gun at the ready. The smiling father, gazed at expectantly by his wife, represents the future of postwar America, a seal lettered with the words “American Legion” behind the mise-en-scène. Life’s August 12 cover, Fortune Teller with Young Couple, again employs the triangular format, with the gypsy fortune-teller in the background reading an incredulous-looking young man’s palm, his sweetheart wriggling happily off to the side. The lush brushstrokes of the latter scene emphasize the Romantic treatment of an already sentimental subject, while the emphasis on angular lines in the earlier cover recalls the leanness of the war times just past. Of the twenty-eight covers that Rockwell provided for Life between 1917 and 1924, sixteen would relate specifically to the Great War. In nearly every case, as in these two postwar paintings, the narrative content emerged from a contrast between the past and the hopes for a future immediately over the horizon.

  In 1920, Rockwell also began a series of twenty full-color oils for Edison Mazda Lampworks, the commissions continuing through 1927. (He completed eight in 1920 alone.) In the beginning, the company paid him $800 per painting, raising his fee to $1,500 at the end of his tenure. Reproduced mainly in the Curtis publications, the Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal, the paintings were some of his most masterful renderings of light and illumination, compelling enough that many of them stand on their own, quite outside the advertising series. Throughout his career, Rockwell took great pleasure in representing light sources, but he never concentrated more attention on the challenge than in this impressive series of intimate social scenes, staged with characters of all ages.

  Quite apart from the intrinsic aesthetic merits of the assignments, or the monetary rewards, Rockwell also lavished exceptional detail on the ads because, in 1918, Maxfield Parrish, a former student of Howard Pyle’s at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and an illustrator whom Rockwell deeply respected, had begun to publish his own series of lushly colored full-page ads for the electric company, a commission he would complete only in 1934. In later years, when asked to reflect on Parrish, Rockwell first lamented that the long-term ad campaigns that Parrish conducted for Edison Mazda as well as his other extensive commitments to advertising art seduced him away from the best use of his talent, “toward greater income” instead. But after Rockwell revisited Parrish’s original paintings at a special exhibition, where he was able to see the work the artist completed for purposes other than commercial commissions, he found himself “completely reconverted” from his earlier agreement with those illustrators who blamed Parrish “for the loss of the ideals of American illustration.” Because he had seen Parrish’s oeuvre in the context of the painter’s entire life, he could again celebrate the artist as “a great technician, a true lover of beauty, a magic colorist and an original humorist.”

  The Edison Mazda advertisements forced Rockwell to think about the ways that electricity had enabled the march into modernity, since that was the major thrust of the company’s campaign. Efficiently, the illustrator made the logical transition from these ads to painting other pictures symbolizing the contraries of past and future. When, for instance, Rockwell painted his Memories cover for Literary Digest (June 25, 1921), the Roaring Twenties had already imprinted its fashion sense on women, but the illustrator instead presents us with a young woman, sitting in an attic among old family relics, lost in thought spawned by examination of pasts not even her own. Painting with obvious reference to the styles of Rembrandt and Vermeer, he lights the scene from a single source, so that the delicate girl, her illumination seeming both natural and otherworldly at the same time, is set apart from the clutter in her midst. The domestic umbers, ochres, and siennas of the attic’s collection of wood, brass, and fabric objects contrast with the breezy blues and whites of the girl’s clothes, so that her figure glows against the worn surfaces.

  What is peculiarly missing from this worldview is the present, a place where the woman is grounded in the particularities of the actual moment. And in that lack, the viewer intuitively enters and completes the painting. The art historian Kathleen Grant aptly glosses this arena: “[It is as] if her thoughts have truly elevated her from the world of dusty realities to a world of glistening dreams. . . . Rockwell paints the girl at the very moment that the dream takes shape behind her quiet eyes—but before it can be reflected in her face. In doing so, he does not suggest the nature of the girl’s fantasy but instead invites us to speculate according to what we see—or wish to see—in the painting.”

  Reluctantly denying himself the painterly challenges that held his attention in the Edison Mazda campaign, Rockwell acquiesced to the enticements of the Orange Crush corporation, though the quid pro quo was strictly money—lots of it—for work. Impressed by his paintings for Edison Mazda, the soda company convinced Rockwell to sign on for a twelve-painting series of ads, largely through the help of the illustrator’s wife, who egged him on in spite of his reservations. After four full-color paintings, he got out of the deal, vowing in the process never to get trapped in an inviolable contract again. Short agreements he could handle; lengthy commitments hedged him in on every level, from the artistic to the logistical to the geographic. He liked his freedom too much to feel owned, he often asserted, and the amount of advertising he undertook was already prodigious. To be at the mercy of an agency’s art director was intolerable.

  Rockwell’s aversion to long-term contracts was encouraged by Leyendecker, whose four decades with the Post never included a written agreement. But a cautionary tale anchored Leyendecker’s freedom to a more mundane reality: without such contracts, the illustrator was never sure of the next month’s income. The “fine artist” assumed that penury might be the price of refusing to sell out by going commercial; the social honor attached to such possible poverty seemed some recompense. But the burden of financial success was ever-present to illustrators, who recognized the trade-off their artistic choices were supposed to purchase: economic stability in lieu of romantic individuality. When offers failed to arrive in time, the illustrators were therefore badly compromised, both practically and emotionally. Leyendecker had dealt with these issues by deciding to live always just beyond his means, declaring that such practices would dictate his continued work and discourage any laziness. Instead, as Rockwell noted in his autobiography, the illustrator was forced to accept too many advertising commissions when other work slowed, and eventually his creative output suffered,
further stalling the high-paying cover assignments he had come to expect.

  Not that Rockwell was immune from investing in glamour. Partly because of Irene’s predilection for the good life, but also as personal recompense for his “deaconish” behavior back in his Art Students League days, when Rockwell worked while others took time off, he allowed himself to play at the decadence that accompanied the twenties as they roared into wealthy Westchester County, taking few prisoners among the upwardly mobile. At the same time, he was keenly aware of his position at the Post, which reached the peak of its success in this decade, when, according to cultural historians, it became “a dominant force in middle-class culture.” Although intellectuals tended to scorn the magazine early on for its ostensible appeal to middlebrow readers, the quality of many of its fiction writers of the period speaks well for the purportedly undereducated classes: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, Stephen Vincent Benét, Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, as well as early works by Carl Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To such evidence of its omnibus appeal, critics replied that illustrious writers had only their second-rate work published by the Post, circular reasoning at best.

  Among the social events that Rockwell recalled somewhat ruefully in later years, when he recounted the Jazz Age in New Rochelle, was the summer party he and Irene attended in Westport, Connecticut, “a raucous affair . . . where all the guests were dressed in pink jackets and riding habits.” Although his autobiography places it much later in the decade, the early morning site of poolside debaucheries and drunken displays of sodden wit must have occurred in 1920, since Fitzgerald played in Westport then, not in the late twenties when he stayed in Europe. In his middle age, the circumspect illustrator noted wryly that “everyone was drunk and a woman fell into the swimming pool and I thought it was all very grand because I met F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famous writer, and heard him sing a rowdy song.”

  At least at the beginning of the decade, Rockwell still felt extremely uncomfortable among high society, even though he could comport himself expertly when required. Far more enjoyable were the trips he and Irene took across the state to her childhood haunts near the St. Lawrence River. Her parents had a wooden “love shack” as they called it, basically a run-down three-room cabin in a small resort area called Louisville Landing, directly across the river from Aultsville, Ontario, a Canadian point of entry from the United States. Today under water as a result of the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s, at the time the “camp” provided a summer respite for Rockwell, who rented a studio in Massena, six or seven miles away. Often he used local settings for the paintings he worked on during these periods, such as the amalgam of the nearby stone church and the Gibsons’ clapboard house on the Christmas 1925 cover of the Post, which also included a local resident as the main character.

  Rockwell’s immediate use of the “real people” in the neighborhood engendered tremendous goodwill, and his gratitude for the need they filled was usually misinterpreted as a stronger affection for the person than really existed. He loved hanging around the camp with the customs officer, Eugene Gibson; the two became “great friends,” and sat on Eugene’s porch “for hours smoking their pipes and swapping stories,” according to Eugene’s family. Rockwell did a lot of fishing on the St. Lawrence in spite of his later protestations of being no sportsman, and one of Eugene’s relatives frequently served as his guide on the fishing trips. According to his great-granddaughter, Connie Lewis Reitz, Eugene was the only person at Louisville Landing with a phone, which allowed him and his family an embarrassing glimpse into the dynamics of his marriage. When Irene was in residence and her husband was in New Rochelle, “Norman would call and ask Aunt Jess to go down the lane and get Irene to come to the phone. Aunt Jess said she always felt so sorry for Norman. He was so nice and Irene was so mean to him. Jess would tell Irene that Norman wanted to speak to her on the phone. Irene would refuse to come to the phone. Jess would go back and tell Norman that she couldn’t locate Irene.”

  The marriage politely limped along, and Rockwell enjoyed Irene’s companionship in the evenings, as well as the pleasure of working hard all day at a job he enjoyed and coming home to a meal cooked by his pretty wife. As long as he was allowed to paint undisturbed, he was content and easy to be around; but when family or friends intruded too often on his studio time, he grew irritable. Such a territorial response to his workaday schedule was necessary or he would never finish all of his commissions; inevitably, he overextended himself by accepting too many offers.

  In 1921, he discovered what would become the antidote to vocational exhaustion: travel. The art director of the Edison Mazda ads, who felt that he and Rockwell were kindred spirits, invited the artist to accompany him on a company trip to Venezuela, the art director’s barely disguised excuse for a vacation. The trip was Rockwell’s first foreign travel, and he realized almost from the first day of his adventure that even the act of relocating to a place outside of work reinvigorated him. And the more exotic the locale, the better. From this point on, whenever he felt overwhelmed by stress, Rockwell dropped his work, in spite of pending deadlines, and took a trip.

  In his autobiography, Rockwell described the adventures the two men shared in terms that suggest the trip was truly dangerous at times. Including everything from a fearsome ocean crossing aboard a ship with a drunken crew, to bullfights and local boundary skirmishes conducted by terrorists, the journey to South America appealed to the curiosity that existed alongside of Rockwell’s loyalty to his own community. Paradoxical though it may be, Rockwell’s cosmopolitan spirit, the citizen-of-the-world mentality that revivified his aesthetic energies, fueled the creation of six decades of what would be variously praised and condemned as “universal,” “timeless” pieces of “Americana.” Without the foreign travel Rockwell undertook throughout his life, the “American” dream of tolerance and liberality and general goodwill would have withered before he was forty.

  Certainly as soon as he reached his own city limits, he was inevitably embroiled in some family drama, either with his parents or with Irene’s family. In 1921, Nancy and Waring, who had moved at least three times since their sons’ weddings in 1916, moved yet again, leaving Brown’s, where they had relocated in 1920. Now they rented an apartment at 145 Center Avenue in New Rochelle, owned by George Peck, a social acquaintance of Norman and Irene’s, who probably helped his friends quietly subsidize the older couple’s home. Certainly, by now Rockwell’s parents could afford to live in a style typical of the solid middle class; Waring’s income hovered around $7,700, and the following year, he even purchased his first car, a Chevrolet sedan, according to the luxury tax he had to pay. Yet signs point to their conscientious son ensuring that they didn’t have to watch their budget.

  If Norman was accustomed to being put upon by his parents, Irene herself felt overburdened by her husband’s expectations. Assuming that because she was married to a well-known illustrator and no longer had to support herself, she could devote her time to cultivating society, she had been surprised to find that Norman assumed she would handle his business correspondence and fan mail, and that she would read to him at night as well. Explaining to her college magazine editor why she was late with her dues, she wrote a note that was published in 1921 in their annual volume: “I am always busy with writing, etc., as I do most of Mr. Rockwell’s work. He is on a trip to South America now, so I am doubly busy attending to everything while he is away.” By this point, Rockwell had established the routine of having someone—usually Irene—answer each piece of fan mail he received, the number of which spanned from ten to two hundred letters per cover. Unflattering responses were almost nonexistent.

  Two paintings that Rockwell produced for the Post in the autumn after he returned from his trip abroad reflect his new awareness of the release that travel provided: the cover published on January 14, 1922, shows a pigeon-toed boy agog over the pictures
inside his exotically labeled three-dimensional viewer; and, a month later, on February 18, an office worker is seen reading, open-mouthed in amazement, a letter or card that transports him from the present moment of workplace tedium.

  The theme of escape continues to permeate Rockwell’s paintings during the twenties and early thirties, though suspension of time, not place, is most often their foundation. The April 29, 1922, Post cover, Boy Lifting Weights, summarizes neatly Rockwell’s consistent ideology that impels him to omit indications of the present moment. The painting’s beanpole boy with the round-lensed glasses is, we know, part of Rockwell’s past: the Francis X. Bushman–type masculine pinup on the wall in front of him, the slogan “it’s easy” (to be a man) written next to his bulging biceps—an image of what could, in theory, have become the transformed adult of the future. A representation of Rockwell in the here and now, however, is absent.

  Franklin Lischke, whose father owned Rockwell’s studio and who, as a boy, modeled for the illustrator, remembers that Rockwell called himself “Francis X. Bushwah” during this period, a self-mockery that referred to the he-man of the times, the silent-movie actor Francis X. Bushman. (Typical of Rockwell’s rich accretive method of association, the “Francis X.” also happened to be the name of Joe Leyendecker’s brother, the “other” Leyendecker.) Bushman was the first screen matinee idol, whose tanned, muscular body made women swoon. The movie star’s celebrity was short, lasting from 1911 to 1915, the period when Rockwell was leaving adolescence behind, along with any hopes he’d had of late blooming. This April 29 Post cover of the skinny, pigeon-toed adolescent pumping iron in front of a mirror, with a muscleman’s picture pasted to the wall for inspiration, was motivated by the illustrator’s own fledgling attempts in his teens to reconfigure his gangly body and regain some standing among his athletically inclined friends.