Whether Rockwell stopped impulsively in Philadelphia is not known; what is clear is that Ben Hibbs enthusiastically accepted the sketches, and Rockwell began work on the paintings by mid-summer, with a promise to deliver them in the late fall or early winter for publication. Late June letters from Hibbs about Rockwell’s plans for his war series contain a message to convey to Mead Schaeffer about the terrific sketches he brought down as well, noting additionally that the Post was excited about Schaeffer’s series. Thus, at the time of this note, June 24, the plans were in place to publish the work in the Post.
But sometime during the fall, OWI reentered the picture, interested in using Rockwell’s Four Freedoms for the Victory Loan Drive, in the process rejecting Ben Shahn’s version. Shahn, a fine and commercial artist (who continued to be one of Rockwell’s greatest admirers) whose work was far grittier and less accessible to the untutored eye than Rockwell’s, had socialist leanings, which may have made him suspect to the OWI. Still, even after Rockwell was tapped by the OWI, its chief of the Graphics Division, Francis Brennan, was furious at the choice of Rockwell over Shahn, especially as Brennan had earlier dismissed Rockwell’s ideas. The agitation over the OWI’s choice of Rockwell culminated in the Writers’ Division resigning en masse, and Brennan and Shahn creating a poster of Liberty holding a Coke (a former Coca-Cola executive, with company ties to Rockwell’s illustrations from the early 1930s, had been the arbiter who chose Rockwell); the caption read, “The War that Refreshes—the Four Delicious Freedoms!”
Rockwell himself saw the chance to illustrate the Four Freedoms as his opportunity to produce the “Big Picture” that every artist dreams of. He hoped to clear the summer of other commitments, concentrating only on bringing home the abstractions to the American people. Under Lorimer’s avowals of isolationism, he had felt restricted from indulging his own passions. Although Rockwell’s low number of covers during World War I was due to his position behind the ranks of the older, accomplished illustrators James Montgomery Flagg and J. C. Leyendecker, he had also been too uncomfortable to go up against Lorimer’s beliefs. Not only was there a new editor now, but Lorimer was dead by the time Rockwell undertook his World War II covers. No paternal ghost threatened the sense of liberation that allowed Rockwell to create the lighthearted Willie Gillis series as well as the somber and more abstract Four Freedoms.
Hibbs gave Rockwell the license to exercise his fervent belief that freedom was due everyone in the world, even if Americans had to contribute to its global realization. But Rockwell also believed that most people reasoned through concrete images far more often and effectively than through abstract principles. His talent, narrating an entire story with one picture, was his tool, and the Four Freedoms, from his point of view, the ultimate challenge to which he would put it.
In spite of his determination to devote his time exclusively to the Four Freedoms, it proved impossible, predictably, to clear his schedule of everything else. At one point during the summer, he had to stop painting and go to Manhattan to see his doctor, Charles Gordon Heyd, who, according to old city records, had restricted his practice to gastroenterology during this period. Rockwell tried to keep medical problems confidential except when he found himself conveniently sick at deadline time, which may account for his not finding a specialist closer to home. A note the artist made to himself laments that the doctor had told him he needed an operation, but, Rockwell wrote next, he informed the doctor that he could not go into the hospital until September, when he would finish the Four Freedoms. What the operation was, or if it ever occurred, remains a mystery. Between illness, finishing commissions for other magazines, and fending off business complications from selling second reproduction rights to earlier artwork, the summer bumped along. Rockwell’s loyalty to the Four Freedoms project was absolute, whatever the reality of his life; the memo he made to himself after his doctor’s appointment included the poignant “Those 4F’s have grown larger and larger in my unfortunate time. I feel that they are worth everything that I can give them and more. I have just got to do that first, it means everything to me” (underlining his).
By now, Ben Hibbs must have known his man well enough not to be surprised when Rockwell told the Post’s art director that he couldn’t meet the fall deadline.
In early autumn 1942, the Post’s art director, Jim Yates, worriedly inquired about Rockwell’s progress, reminding him that they needed the paintings soon in order to publish them as they had planned. Rockwell’s recent admission to them that he had junked the complete first painting because he had overworked it, and now was redoing it, made them extremely nervous. Rockwell wrote back a pleading letter, explaining that while he realized they had a right to be concerned—that the writers (Booth Tarkington, Will Durant, Carlos Bulosan, and Stephen Vincent Benét) had all sent in their texts and he was very late on even the first painting—he wanted them to rest assured that he would get them all done soon. He worked exclusively on the first one, Freedom of Speech, for a month and a half, believing it to be the most challenging because it contained so many characters. He assured them that he now had it under complete control, that it would go quickly, and that he had cleared his calendar completely for the other three paintings, Post covers, and the “unavoidable Boy Scout Calendar,” which would only take a few days. Fervently, he concluded the letter by saying, “I just cannot express to you how much this series means to me. Aside from their wonderful patriotic motive, there are no subjects which could rival them in opportunity for human interest painting. Believe me, they deserve everything I can give them.”
In mid-November, the Post was even more worried than the OWI. Ben Hibbs himself wrote Rockwell to beg him not to redo the third picture, Freedom from Want, as Jim Yates had relayed to him was the artist’s plan. He wooed Rockwell into accepting his praise of the painting as it stood by explaining that the artist’s concern that his painting didn’t match the text of the Filipino laborer that would accompany it was irrelevant—the two were not supposed to reflect the same perspective, merely deal with the same subject. Cleverly, and truthfully, Hibbs appealed to Rockwell’s painterly side: the government was going to impose a restriction on four-color use inside the magazine, where the pictures would be published. If Rockwell didn’t get them the remaining pictures in the next two or three weeks, they might be stuck reproducing them in halftones at best. Politely, but urgently, Hibbs ended the letter with, “Time really is of the essence now, and I can’t help being deeply worried.”
At that point, probably in relief after the paintings had all been delivered, Jim Yates composed a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” with two stanzas immortalizing Rockwell’s frightening habit with deadlines:
Just then did he remember, he had promised last September,
Paintings of the Freedoms, said he would complete all four,
Through weeks and months he pondered, he planned and thought
and wondered,
How to paint one on Religion, all the while he gently swore
He never had such trouble with any job before,
Not with any job before.
Spoke Yates, I am in trouble, so I came up here to huddle,
To beg, to plead, to coax, yes, to implore
Please don’t think I am nagging, as the time seems to be dragging,
But our presses wait and wait, on almost every floor,
Waiting for the Freedoms, we expected long before
Only that and nothing more.
Rockwell finished all four paintings by the year’s end, and the Post began publishing them on February 20, 1943. That same week, the OWI publicly announced its plan to issue several million poster reproductions of the series. The first picture, Freedom of Speech, conveys its abstract principle by showing a handsome, modern-but-rugged man standing in the midst of a group, having his say. Presumably based on Rockwell’s oft-quoted inspiration for the piece, this was a town meeting where his neighbor was politely listened to in spite of dissenting opinions, and the
seated citizens looking up at the speaker have various opinions themselves. The American ideal that the painting is meant to encapsulate shines forth brilliantly for those who have canonized this work as among Rockwell’s great pictures. For those who find the piece less successful, however, Rockwell’s desire to give concrete form to an ideal produces a strained result. To such critics, the people looking up at the speaker have stars in their eyes, their posture conveying celebrity worship, not a room full of respectful dissent. The man sitting behind the speaker, as well as the speaker himself, could be staring toward the heavens instead of focusing on people in the room. Rockwell started the painting over four times, uncomfortable with the formal grouping until the last version. In the upper left corner of the painting, he included a partial view of his own face, his eye positioned at the highest point of view in the room full of ten citizens.
Commonly considered little more than a stock-in-trade signature, similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie cameos, Rockwell’s appearances on many of his covers attest, according to Peter Rockwell—a sculptor and art historian—to the deep interest his father took in theoretical questions about truth in realistic art. Rockwell’s speculations about art and reality are manifested in several ways throughout his career: in the early thirties, for instance, he had created a cover with the billboard artist facing his project, the audience privy only to his back; but one oversized, boldly flirtatious eye stares challengingly at us from the billboard. Other times, philosophical challenges are implied through his paintings-about-paintings, covers that allow the picture itself to react to the viewers who are claiming their right to judge; occasionally, he combined his famous April Fools’ Day cover (replete with forty to sixty logical incongruities) with the painting that speaks from its frame, such as the April 3, 1943, Post cover. Even Rockwell’s particular use of the age-old conceit of the self-portrait emphasizes the slippery nature of truth in art, slyly reminding others that his paintings are not the imitations of life they often believe them to be.
Rockwell’s intellectual sophistication jousted with his need to please his audience, and the only way he played out such academic questions about reality versus representation was indirectly, toying with the viewers in a highly private way, asserting his own authority as artist outside of the solidarity with the mythic “Average American” in which his popularity was grounded. Rockwell had, by this point, firmly established an unsettling way of appearing to side with the crowd, while in effect holding himself aloof, above them. Critic Arthur Danto, who admires Rockwell’s “intelligence,” feels that “there is something I have not been able to put into words about his depiction of people. He seemed at once sympathetic to them and superior to them. He does not take them seriously, and the joke is almost always at their expense, as he causes the viewer to feel superior.” Paradoxically, Rockwell inserts himself into the paintings to allow himself to stand back from the implied viewers, to feel superior to them as well.
Every artist has a psychological strategy underlying his imagination, however accessibly or not it appears. Rockwell’s layers-of-seeing becomes an overt subject in many of his paintings, such as Fireman (1945), The Art Critic (1954), and Triple Self-Portrait (1961). But it’s already present in a less thematic way earlier, in scenes meant to be viewed sympathetically—fixed objects of the audience’s knowing gaze. Behind the sentimental exchange lurks a sense of the puppeteer, never out of control. “He robs the subject of a certain dignity in order to make the viewer feel better about himself,” the otherwise admiring Danto complains. It was similar to the way that his mother had used her weak younger son to sustain her own fragile self-importance.
The three paintings that followed the first one were also Post covers: Freedom to Worship appeared on February 27, 1942, Freedom from Want on March 6, and Freedom from Fear on March 13. The last two paintings disappointed Rockwell, at least in retrospect, because he felt they came off as smug, especially to Europeans lacking the comfort of distance from the battlegrounds that Americans at home enjoyed. Freedom from Want, a Thanksgiving table set with minimal food in comparison with the typical American feast day, nonetheless flaunts in the face of the less fortunate, Rockwell came to believe, the overabundance of turkey, celery, fruit, and Jell-O. Freedom from Fear errs by allowing American viewers to sigh in relief that they can tuck their children into bed safely each night, in sharp contrast to the victims of the bombings alluded to in the newspaper the father holds.
But the second painting, Freedom to Worship, which took Rockwell two months to complete, pleased him immensely. He fully worked up his preliminary idea in a detailed oil painting on canvas, forty-one by thirty-three inches. Because to Rockwell tolerance was the basis for a democracy’s religious diversity, he decided to show a Jewish man being shaved by a New England Protestant barber, while a black man and a Roman Catholic priest waited their turns. He found himself unable to characterize the men not in clerical garb without resorting to offensive stereotypes—exaggerating the Jewish man’s Semitic features, squaring the white customer into a preppy golfer, and rendering the black man as an agrarian. The composition is clean, impressively sparse, in counterpoise to a dense narrative content. Beautifully painted even at the preliminary oil sketch stage, the picture would have failed to convey clearly the government’s theme, even if it had exemplified Rockwell’s own spirituality.
When he devised his new scheme, he still found ways to suggest the diversity of the population, but more subtly, through visual clues among a unified mass of heads. One man holds the Koran, one woman a rosary, while the man in the middle of the painting exhibits a Roman nose, in clear but understated contrast to the rest of the worshippers. Two very-dark-skinned black congregants frame the painting diagonally, a woman at the top left, a man at the bottom right. The Post had not yet made a practice of moving blacks into prominent visual positions, and Rockwell later explained that he bucked the Curtis system by “furtively” painting the face of the black woman at the top; the man at the bottom, with his fez, was too obviously foreign to offend. Across the top of the canvas the aphorism “Each according to the dictates of his own conscience” is lettered in gold, a platitude that suggests the plurality of Rockwell’s own thoughts on religion: its likely source was a phrase included in the “Thirteen Articles of Faith” by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly known as the Mormons). Rockwell spent almost two full months on the Freedom to Worship theme, worried that religion “is an extremely delicate subject. It is so easy to hurt so many people’s feelings.”
Unfortunately, the tight amalgam of faces—individually exqui-sitely rendered but en masse saturated with piety—and even the crepey skin on the elderly hands, which have become the objects of worship, push the theme over the edge from idealistic tolerance into gooey sentiment, where human difference seems caught up in a magical moment of dispensation from the Light. The restraint demanded by art that deals with heightened emotion is lacking.
To their detractors, the Four Freedoms try to carry too much weight on their shoulders. The idea of illustrating grandiose concepts with humble correlatives is a sound one; but the executions of Rockwell’s scenes announce their own ambition too loudly to work on that premise. Rockwell was forthright about wanting these paintings to be his masterpieces, his “Big Idea” pictures, as he put it. Inevitably, he was unsatisfied, though he believed himself to have articulated in Freedom of Speech the nobility of certain abstract principles that he valued deeply. Paradoxically, had Rockwell not struggled so hard to be worthy, if he had stripped down his portrayals to the kind of quiet small scenes he would do in the fifties, the series might have been the big pictures he desperately wanted to produce.
Still, most viewers felt in 1942 like the twenty-first-century New York Times critic who admires Rockwell’s mastery: “I’m not interested in the intentions of artists. . . . I’m interested in consequences.” And, while some people thought that Rockwell’s paintings conveyed a slightly patronizin
g take on his subjects, the majority of his audience saw it otherwise; as The New Yorker would remark two years after the publication of the Four Freedoms: “They were received by the public with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than any other paintings in the history of American art.”
Viewed in the best light, the paintings prove an example of the sum exceeding its parts, the total effect of four domestic paintings about such lofty ideals inspirational in their combined heft alone. The Four Freedoms did, in fact, forward the aims that Roosevelt had set forth and accomplished the work that the best illustrated fairy tales attempt, turning abstractions into forms that exorcise demons. In any event, the United States Treasury quickly surmised their profitability, harnessing the original oils to a tour, cosponsored with The Saturday Evening Post, of sixteen cities, seen by 1,222,000 people, and raising $133 million in war bonds for the Treasury. The Freedom of Speech painting illustrated the commemorative covers for war bonds and stamps sold during the show. The exhibition’s significance even motivated board members at Rockefeller Center to make extensive alterations to the International Building in order to properly house the exhibition.
Rockwell was pleased at the public’s reception to the paintings, and at least as happy that his art had filled the coffers of a cause he supported. He did not, however, become heavily involved with the exhibition, instead mostly limiting his appearances on its behalf to those locations where he needed to travel in order to undertake new assignments. As usual, he barely paused to take in the present; he was already thinking ahead to what he could do in the wake of his latest success.
Norman Rockwell Page 37