Oddly, such an emphasis on what could become, or what is going to happen, or on something that already occurred for which people now yearn ineffably and ineffectually, sustains a narrative desire that transforms the ordinary into the universal, even at the same time that it seems to emphasize the individual. Desire as the underlying motif sanctifies viewers’ belief that what they are responding to is applicable to any person anywhere—even as the audience assume the experience to be very specifically rooted to their own moment in time.
Critics sensitive to the dangers of false universalizing, of claiming attention to the individual when in fact most of the complexities of culture are obliterated in the name of that particular “universal” creature, consider such narrative strategy an act of bad faith. And certainly the role that Rockwell’s humanism plays in maintaining a culture’s preferred view of itself should be held to close and constant scrutiny; art must be accountable, at least if one believes in its relationship with and importance to a society. But there is another side to the same coin: for one thing, it has proven impossible to travel to parts of the world where one might expect Rockwell not to translate hospitably, and fail to be surprised at the Chinese, Pakistani, or Sudanese response to the “human moment” common to Rockwell’s American fans. Too, the act of holding up a mirror to some of a culture’s best impulses—to present an idealized portrait as if its positive values are within reach of every citizen—may possess merit more complicated than a typically disapproving historical analysis will allow. Would the nation have been better served had Rockwell painted the social realities that loomed at least as large as the space of desire he created instead? Perhaps. But it is naïve to insist that anyone knows the answer.
12
Building a Home on a Weak Foundation
In the spring of 1922, Rockwell decided that he wanted to study abroad for a few months. Despite his pleading with Irene to join him on what would be the first trip to Europe for either of them, she elected to stay home. Rockwell remained in Paris for eighteen days, attending art school in the morning in an effort to expand his vistas. He lived in a small students’ hotel in the Latin Quarter, spending afternoons at the galleries and museums and sketching everywhere he went (unaccountably, leaving most of the results in Paris). At the end of this period, he spent another two weeks traveling in southern France and along the Italian Riviera, then into Switzerland.
Speculation abounds that Irene chose to spend Rockwell’s weeks of absence in local dalliances of her own. One longtime explorer of Rockwell’s trail, Robert Berridge, interviewed two of Irene’s closest friends thirty years ago and, as a result, hints that she stayed behind because of the “seven-year itch.” No hard evidence proves extramarital involvements by either party in the early twenties, but the likelihood is high, given the marital openness she and Norman would pledge within several years. And Irene’s careless lack of interest in her husband, other than as a companion to exciting social events and as an excellent wage earner, was always embarrassingly obvious to suburbanites in New Rochelle.
Margaret McBurney, a highly credible source whose family knew the O’Connors and whose good friend was close to Irene as well, insists that at one point during this period Rockwell’s wife “ran off with the chauffeur.” In light of the illustrator’s method of bowdlerizing the events in his autobiography, it seems probable that his slightly incongruous story about a profiteer’s chauffeur working as a go-between to bilk Rockwell of his savings is in fact a subtle reference to the affair. Rockwell explains that once when he was “away”—this time, supposedly in the hospital—the chauffeur led his wife to the shady investor, who convinced her to turn over $10,000 the couple had saved from Rockwell’s work. Even more pathetic than it would have been anyway, the story manages to victimize the innocent painter for his ineffectiveness; instead of spending any time recovering from a nose operation, he had to go to work immediately to remake their fortune. To make matters worse, Irene was recklessly indiscreet, and Nancy Rockwell began to get fed up with the public gossip trailing her son’s marriage around town.
Rockwell ignored his mother’s warnings about family propriety and focused on the professional definition he had struggled with abroad. The School of Paris was flourishing, a disparate, loosely knit conglomerate of international artists that encouraged various forms of representational art, especially since analytic Cubism, Picasso’s major contribution, had waned in influence. At the least, the aesthetic atmosphere was more congenial now to a figural painter than it had been before the Great War. Nonetheless, during the classes, he explained in his autobiography, students had approached him and accused him of being behind the times; his attention to drawing marked him immediately, they told him, as passé.
Visiting American artists insulted him more ambivalently than the European students had: Rockwell recounted that several friends from his student days approached him and lamented that he had gone over to the enemy—“You have sold your art! You had good possibilities but you have sacrificed your talent by descending to a level that satisfies the multitude. You are lost!” Before he left for the States, however, these same “advocates of the new art” cornered him to ask if they too could find some advertising jobs back home.
Rockwell was well aware of the trend of American artists taking up residence in Paris, and he ensured that he’d never be mistaken for an expatriate in the making: upon his return, a local newspaper reporter noted happily that “Mr. Rockwell went to Paris this spring, but he didn’t remain long. If the boys were fond of him before he left, their affections were increased many times when he said on his return, ‘America is the place for me, boys!’ ”
As if determined to anoint the young man the patron saint of local boys, the journalist practically emasculated the artist whom mothers in New Rochelle preferred over Sunday school for their sons: “Mothers are wont to remark that they would as soon have their sons in Norman Rockwell’s care as in church—so great, so good, so uplifting, is his influence on little boys.” Asked to account for his success with the youngsters, Rockwell responded politically: “Perhaps it was that satisfaction I received from having my work accepted together with an intimate love I’ve always had for children that directed me toward the work that has now become a hobby with me—that is, painting little boys, and having them for my models, thereby enjoying their youthful and inspiring dispositions.”
Within a year, Rockwell had massaged his foray into foreign venues into a refinement of his mythical Americanness, establishing an image that would ward off the thing he feared most: being forgotten. Writing admiringly of the homespun artist, his interviewer explained: “Before leaving home, he had thought to remain abroad perhaps a year and carry on his work, but he wished to continue with American subjects and there he found not enough characters typically American from which to work. . . . The simple, genuine qualities of American life present unlimited subjects, to his mind, for the painter who will but see and understand and properly value his own people.”
By this point, Rockwell’s aspirations to reach beyond his earlier achievements in style and content had been doused with a splash of cold reality, at the hands of George Horace Lorimer. When the illustrator returned from his spring 1922 journey abroad, he excitedly carried to the Philadelphia office at least one painting done in the “modern style,” which Rockwell later recanted as a very poor imitation of Matisse. Lorimer thought it over for a while, then turned and gave one of his top two cover artists a little speech about sticking to the simple stuff he did best. Rockwell was plagued already with fears that during his travels his public (including the Boss) would defect, and Lorimer’s dislike of the new material frightened him. Exploring new territory, risking leaving a proven success, is scary under the most supportive circumstances; the combined pressures of Irene’s emphasis on income and Lorimer’s on continuity conspired to keep Rockwell firmly in his place.
Within a few years of this first trip to Paris, his friend Clyde Forsythe would explain that whenever
Rockwell’s schedule overwhelmed him, he just peremptorily jumped up and left—took an unplanned trip to a “far-off land”—“astonished to find upon his return that his clients still remember him.” His surprise at his continued success moved Forsythe to remark, with some satisfaction, upon Rockwell’s “inferiority complex,” proof of which is Rockwell’s consistent dissatisfaction with every painting he completed, believing that “the fine thing is always yet to be done.”
Although decades later in his autobiography Rockwell professed his awe of George Horace Lorimer, the truth was more complicated. (His canny modesty deceived at least one otherwise astute Lorimer scholar, however, who explains that other artists were not quite as “dominated” as Rockwell was by the crusty editor.) In 1922, Lorimer was busy interpreting America to itself, frequently in thoughtful, complicated ways. He supported the repeal of Prohibition, even as he insisted that Americans obey the oppressive law until they changed it. Farm prices, taxes, the current state of the theatre, crime statistics, town and highway construction, the Ku Klux Klan—it seemed that little escaped the Post’s scrutiny. On one of the most controversial subjects, war debts, Lorimer was adamant: he believed that the European nations that had incurred war debts should pay them, instead of depending on the open purses of underappreciated Americans whom the Old World dared still treat condescendingly. It was the right, even the responsibility, of individuals to make their own way, he argued, limited only by their willingness to work hard.
Lorimer’s earlier wartime isolationism, his diatribes against immigration, and his contempt for the popular idea of a melting-pot stew were a few of the positions that did not sit easily with Rockwell. Maintaining a formal but cordial relationship over the years helped the artist to retain a sense of philosophical detachment from the Post’s editorial content. After all, his covers were remote from the content within, their major objective the creation of a visual story whose narrative could be read at a glance. He respected the editor, but he did not agree with his politics, solving the uncomfortable schism by retreating behind a claim of being apolitical.
Such an assertion was meant to ward off demands that he pick sides on any issues that would, in the end, only encroach on his work schedule. But his “apolitical” and charitable demeanor encouraged people to ask too much of him at times; and his preoccupation with his painting frequently was mistaken for passivity, allowing his goodwill to be abused. When Irene’s father, Henry O’Connor, died of liver disease on August 10, 1922, the Potsdam grocer had made no arrangements for the financial future of his bewildered wife or three unmarried children. In short order, Rockwell found himself supporting them all under his own roof. For the next two years, though the arrangements would alter slightly, the four O’Connors occupied more of Irene’s attention than did Rockwell, who found himself alternately amused by Hoddy O’Connor, Irene’s brother, and repulsed by his profligate appetites.
Although Rockwell had coexisted with several generations under one roof most of his life, he did not refer to the actual experiences in his paintings. Instead, he idealized the contrast of ages in his art. Two covers alone in the year following the onslaught of in-laws, A Meeting of Minds on February 3, 1923, and The Virtuoso on April 28, develop the contrast between a youngster interacting with an aged man. The February cover shows a little girl listening admiringly to the older cellist, who is facing the audience. The second picture reverses the order, foregrounding dramatically a handsome prodigy playing his violin before an awestruck older musician at his feet, eclipsed by the full-size representation of the young man who clearly is destined to take his place. In each painting, a theme of connecting through what is unvoiced, through an imaged arena of longing, conveys the scene’s power—the girl and the old man, separated by too many years to bridge with words, are united in the unspoken realm of beautiful sound; the virtuoso, by contrast, reminds the elderly admirer, holding his own instrument, of what he has lost, if only the potential versus its realization.
Consistent with his reluctance to focus on the time at hand, Rockwell addressed the prospect of change by developing a theme that valued retrospectively and appropriately something from the past, while optimistically implying the equally satisfying substitution of a future. This perspective purchased a complete denial or avoidance of a present that would otherwise demand introspection. The “timelessness” that fans and despoilers alike ascribe to Rockwell’s art resides largely in this implication of a charitable timeline, with life’s vagaries made bearable through the promise of history’s ultimately benevolent march.
By avoiding the present during these years, except through the most reassuring references, Rockwell spoke to the anxiety underlying the nation’s buoyancy. The audience Rockwell played to was, in many ways, as culturally uneasy with the moment at hand as he was with its psychological weight. As at the turn of the century, technology was transforming the culture at a breakneck speed, from mass productions in print to the proliferation of movies, radio, and the ultimate instrument of change, the automobile. Even the emotional energies required to make the transition to the new information age fomented stress; many of Rockwell’s largely middle-class audience had been born into an antebellum or Victorian sensibility. To reflect on the past and to project a positive future had the effect, paradoxically, of slowing things down long enough to make sense out of what threatened otherwise to disintegrate into cultural disarray.
This dynamic was not, in the end, nostalgia, though Rockwell’s narratives were often appropriated to such an end. His distaste for pausing from his assignments long enough to register fully the life of the moment apparently reflected the agitated depression driving his obsession with work. His father’s storytelling through the heart and narrative voice of Charles Dickens had provided the first meaningful escape from the incoherence of his family life; the early popularity he gained through his ability to draw took over later on. Rockwell realized when quite young how to be well liked, and though he developed fully his most rewarding personality traits—his humor, his spontaneity, his warmth, his easy tolerance of others, his native intelligence—he sought most of all to be loved through his skill as an artist. His career was motivated by such a need; audience response validated his art. On those rare occasions when he failed to elicit the communal chord he had expected, Rockwell took the disappointment as a spur to aim higher on the next project. The popular perception was correct: the painter cared greatly what his untutored viewers thought. The reasons for such reciprocity between artist and audience were less than salutary, more complicated than the image created by the media. Rockwell admitted that his entire identification as a worthwhile human being resulted from sustaining his art as the conduit to love. If he stopped painting, or if people stopped liking his work, he would resume his identity as the eternally pigeon-toed youth who saw repeated reincarnations throughout the decades of canvases. His painting bought him love; and with his extreme intelligence, the man never doubted the connection between people wanting his art and wanting him. On Rockwell’s side, his role soon enough became a responsibility, a duty that he felt he owed his audience. From his father he had learned the honor of being dutiful, but he could never quite shirk the sense of duty’s confinement as well.
As a result of the lifelong, inextricable link between what he did and who he was, Rockwell would find himself in a quandary every few years, sometimes more often. He desired the freedom to paint as one of those very Greenwich Village artists the local journalists smugly set in contrast to their man—in other words, answerable to no one but himself. His work as an illustrator—and his greater psychological needs as a man—argued otherwise. Inevitably, infrangibly, the need to be loved prevailed.
Within three or four years of Westchester County’s determined mythmaking, Rockwell had decided how to fine-tune the romance of his origins. His tweaking of his past now substituted a sense of having his destiny prescribed by Nancy and Waring for his earlier accounts of an almost preternaturally adroit use of pen and paper. By th
e end of May 1923, he was explaining to interviewers that “at the age of eleven [he had] had his career all mapped out for him by his mother.” His personal coming-to-art took place under the loving counsel of wise parents: “unlike the usual beginnings of genius,” as one approving interviewer noted, “his talent was not stifled at home but encouraged.” This new emphasis shored up the growing consensus that Rockwell was an artist of the people, ensuring that the illustrator had emerged full-blown from a “normal” home. What did he gain from this shift of emphasis?
Rockwell took solace in assuming his parents’ preordained knowledge of his career. His desire to be connected to them, precisely because the real relationship was so superficial, would somehow, of course, surface in his work. Just as important, if he needed his art to win him popular love, he realized that the public he served appreciated the kind of family-man painter who had humbly reacted to his first acceptance by the Post with complete restraint; according to the admiring writer at the Standard-Star, “his feet [are] squarely planted on the highway to recognition and success.” Once again, the journalist domesticated the artist into a nonthreatening species of the man next door, a guise well served by Rockwell’s own natural diffidence and good humor. If acquiescence to the model foisted on him repeatedly by suburban writers would serve his future as a successful illustrator, why resist?
Norman Rockwell Page 22