The picture is not without flickers of condescension: the dramatic red initials of Pollock’s name mock the Action Painter’s self-importance. But the painter-narrator patronizes the other side as well, anointing the precise-looking gentleman with a swirl of abstract paint atop his bald pate, and arranging the sparse hair itself around his head to echo the shapes of the painting’s drips.
By entering the drip picture alone in a local art contest at the Berkshire Museum, where he won second place, and by sending it to a Cooperstown art show under an assumed name, Rockwell further seemed to mock abstract painting. And he did succumb to various offhand comments implying a subtext of contempt for the vagaries of drip painting versus the craft of traditional easel work. When Jackson Pollock had been crowned the probable “best painter in the world” by Life during 1949, the magazine had published a picture of Pollock in his infamous “crouch” position; now, as he worked on The Connoisseur, Rockwell had Louis Lamone photograph him in the same pose.
Of course, by 1962, the fuss in the art world wasn’t about Abstract Expressionism anymore anyway; those battles had been won, and Pop Art’s ascendancy reflected a renewed emphasis on representation and the figure. Rockwell was too close to the traditions of academic narrative painting to benefit from the turnaround, however, and his painting implies his awareness of this irony as well. In the January 1962 issue of Esquire, he explained, “I call myself an illustrator but I am not an illustrator. Instead I paint storytelling pictures which are quite popular but unfashionable.”
Molly discouraged Norman’s spending what she considered a disproportionate amount of energy on such issues anyway. She believed in the lessons inherent in her strong New England background, which emphasized activity and movement, not contemplation. To escape the end of the Massachusetts winter and greet spring sooner than Stockbridge would allow, the couple went to Hollywood, where Rockwell did research for two books scheduled for publication at the end of the year, Poor Richard’s Almanac and Folk Heroes of the Old West. He relayed his progress to the Famous Artists Magazine for their spring report, which also printed recent news from Ben Shahn and Will Barnet, two somewhat hip instructors who had helped update the institute’s reputation. And to Helen Macy, who had assumed control of the Heritage Press, he wrote that Molly and he had spent innumerable hours in Philadelphia ensuring the authenticity of his illustrations for the Almanac.
Late in 1963 and into the following year, the Rockwells undertook some serious travel, flying to Russia on behalf of the State Department’s international art initiatives and to Egypt in order for Rockwell to paint President Gamal Nasser’s portrait. In the U.S.S.R., Rockwell traveled as a “specialist” under the aegis of the United States Information Agency. He attended the nation’s equivalent of the World’s Fair, the Exhibit of Economic Achievements of the Soviet Republics, where he shared a raised platform with three other American artists, all of whom were supposed to work in front of the crowds of visitors, showing them their particular techniques. Rockwell, who was temporarily suspended from the show when an unusual-looking intellectual whom he painted realistically complained that the portrait was a caricature aimed at mocking him, pulled the most interesting-looking people out of line and did rapid oil sketches, exhibiting his ability to paint loosely when he wanted. The sketches, each of which had to be completed within an hour, are evocative and intelligent, but the lack of finish, perhaps because of what we’ve come to expect from Rockwell, diminishes their power. More successful are the photodocumentary-type paintings he did of a Russian classroom.
The portrait of Egypt’s Nasser would be the artist’s last cover for the Post. Rockwell did not enjoy portrait painting, according to at least one interview he gave, and his knowledge that the Post would allow him little else nowadays stemmed any nostalgia he might have felt when he realized the magazine was dying. Both Look and McCall’s began negotiations to secure his services, and though he was flattered at the almost desperate entreaties of the latter, he realized that Look, known for its aesthetic quality, would afford him the greatest chance to branch out into the humanitarian pictures he wanted to paint.
Look magazine was in the midst of its short-lived “golden years” when Rockwell agreed to work for it. Dan Mich had returned as editor after a long hiatus, and Collier’s and the Post, the magazine’s longtime rivals, were breathing their last, leaving the field open. It expanded its foreign coverage, it published a series on religion by Leo Rosten, and it chronicled the rise of racial tension in the South. This last emphasis most engaged Rockwell’s interest, and he would produce what are arguably some of his most effective, moving paintings for the inside, not the covers, of Look magazine, before it began its decline in 1966. And the relationship with art director Allen Hurlburt that began in the fall of 1963 would prove enriching, not constricting, and allow him, at the age of sixty-nine, yet another significant chapter in his long career.
Rockwell’s turn to an entirely different theme, centered on the most radical kind of disharmony experienced in the United States, creates a dramatic counterstatement to his decades of illuminating cultural harmony. In this conversion, he leaves the more domestic, feminine world of the beautiful—the small and ornamental and local—for what Michael Fried calls, in speaking of the American realist Thomas Eakins, the “figural sublime.” Literary writers on the sublime, including Thomas Weisel and Harold Bloom, have most often cast this aesthetic as a powerful struggle against one’s artistic forebears in an effort to clear space. For Rockwell, the new sublime is a pronouncement that he is willing to pit himself against painterly representations of big ideas. He had been eager to go in such a direction since at least 1943, when he called the Four Freedoms “the big idea pictures,” but at that time he was yoked to positive representations only.
This same year, incongruously enough, he painted the portrait of Barry Goldwater, “a remarkable cranium to draw, tho I’m not sure what’s inside it,” he quipped; then he traveled three weeks later to the White House, to paint the curmudgeonly Lyndon Johnson. “He was very brusque when I went into his office,” Rockwell recalled, “and when I asked for an hour to make sketches he almost hit the ceiling. He told me the best he could afford was twenty minutes and told me to get cracking. I decided to do the best I could, but he was just sitting there glowering at me. I finally said, ‘Mr. President, I have just done Barry Goldwater’s portrait and he gave me a wonderful grin. I wish you’d do the same’—and for the rest of the session he sat there with a fixed smile like he was competing for the Miss America title.”
As he did with all the portraits, most infamously with the number he did, reluctantly, of Richard Nixon, Rockwell emphasized the best physical features of Johnson and modified the unattractive ones. Johnson, predictably, was thrilled with a portrait that he could rightfully believe looked like him, even though the wattles under his chin and the prominence of his ears were invisible. When the artist Peter Hurd was commissioned three years later to create the official portrait of Johnson, a brouhaha erupted when Johnson insisted Hurd’s more somber and less cosmetic painting was “the ugliest thing I ever saw,” and whipped out the Rockwell to press on Hurd as an example of good painting. Hurd was pursued by reporters until he revealed his hurt feelings as well as his pique that Rockwell, who spent only twenty minutes with the president and then painted from the sketch he made and photographs he had taken, was vaunted over Hurd, who had painted from life.
The contretemps was in all the major newspapers, and Peter Hurd, a gentle and generous man by nature, wrote a letter to Rockwell apologizing for the comment he had made in haste and anger, and emphasizing his respect for Rockwell’s work. Rockwell would respond with a similarly gracious note, but the public implications of his inferior status that continued to be part of the culture must have stung. Perhaps his ego was gratified, though the occasion was too grim for true pleasure, when the Post reused his earlier portrait of John Kennedy on its commemorative issue after the president’s assassination.
Two weeks into 1964, and two weeks before his seventieth birthday, Rockwell gave dramatic notice of his new willingness to stake his political and philosophical territory more openly than he had in the past. The Problem We All Live With appeared in the January 14 issue of Look magazine. Inspired by reading about Ruby Bridges’s first day at William Frantz Public School in New Orleans and the violence accompanying school desegregation attempts all over the South, Rockwell had painted a stunning narrative of four seemingly huge United States marshals, their bodies cut off at the shoulders by the top of the canvas, escorting a young, very dark black girl to school. Their massive impersonality, benign but anonymous, contrasts with her smallness. The child walks with a combined stiffness and unnatural strut that belies her fright, and the preternatural whiteness of her dress against the deep glow of her skin not only announces the theme of the painting—it takes on a spiritual symbolism, as if challenging Americans to act any way other than morally righteous. On the wall behind the little parade is the ugly scrawling, “nigger,” with red splashes of color that read at first glance as blood rather than the tomatoes splattered against the wall that they are. The letters “KKK” are carved on the wall in the left part of the picture, and, as if to counterbalance the ugliness of those initials, Rockwell has painted NR + MP in a tiny heart at the bottom, a love note to the wife who has emboldened him. As Susan Meyer has pointed out, the gaping space between the girl and the men behind her represents about two fifths of the entire canvas, “deadly” were it not for Rockwell’s skillful treatment of the tomato-stained concrete wall.
Although Look magazine received a small amount of hate mail over the painting, the response was largely positive. Black and white readers wrote to say that the painting said more than they could explain to their children or to themselves with words. And some of them wanted to go on record that this would prove a painting for the ages.
During this same year, Rockwell got up the nerve to tell his old friend at Brown and Bigelow, Claire Briggs, that he needed to stop doing the Four Seasons calendar. Feebly, he blames the decision on his doctor for telling him he needed to take it easy. Molly had ensured that his financial affairs were healthy, and he wanted time and space to continue painting scenes of the contemporary world around him. Now he began to earn good money not for escaping to the past, but for documenting the present.
In late winter of 1964, Rockwell traveled to Cape Kennedy to paint a series commissioned by Look on Project Gemini, the series of two-man orbital flights that would include actual space walks for the first time. Rockwell found the creativity that went into producing space suits staggering, and he painted the astronauts suiting up at Cape Kennedy as a kind of modern-day romance, the equivalent of “Sir Galahad girding for battle,” as he worded his inspiration for Look readers.
The most exotic record he painted of contemporary life was not, however, of the United States, but of daily existence deep within the Blue Nile region, a native area previously explored by only a few white men. Chris and Mary Schafer’s son John had joined the Peace Corps, and the Rockwells took him up on his invitation to visit. Rockwell turned the trip into visual material for Look, using John himself for what would become the June 14, 1966, cover story on the Peace Corps. John Shafer recalls his amazement at the Rockwells’ derring-do: “They flew in on a tiny twin-engine plane, landing on the grass plot near us. I was just shocked; these seventy-year-olds acting like young adventurers.”
All was not fun and games, however. Notes that Rockwell scribbled during sleepless early-morning hours in 1965 attest to his continual struggle over what impulse to trust, and which loyalties to honor:
If only I can hold onto it. To hell with the magazines, my responsibilities. You [Molly] will help, be with me . . . If only I have the steadfastness and get out of the rust [he probably meant to write ruts] of fear not a masterpiece and publicity and popularity (cheap) Maybe even no photos Isn’t a Peace corps picture the answer. Youthful dedication. Something bigger than yourself. Maybe not art but my only answer, not some magazine or art editor or publicity but of my own free will Have I the steadfastness???? with you It isn’t just a glorious hollow gesture. Is it? It’s late I must do it soon Isn’t the Peace Corps the answer. Maybe don’t go to them do it on our own. You and me. But I mustn’t be silly. obligations to commitments family Can I keep it up? . . . doubts, weakness, fear . . . Not the Peace Corps one that allen [Hurlburt, the art editor of Look] like but the one I like and believe in. . . . Am I dogging life? No . . . anyone I respect would respect this.
Ironically, in a twist that Rockwell would have appreciated had its implications not been so evil, his name became publicly confused at this time with a hatemonger of the first order, American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. In the old days, when he and left-wing Rockwell Kent had been mistaken for each other, he was largely amused; Kent was talented and intelligent. Now he was upset; this Nazi Rockwell staged appearances around the country, particularly in New York City, as a storm trooper sent to help white Americans wipe out Jews and blacks, both of which he referred to by vile epithets. Eventually, the illustrator began writing to newspapers that printed the misidentification, threatening legal action if they didn’t rectify their mistake. Although all of them, from The Huntsville Times to The New York Times—which, on February 24, 1965, would have to clarify that Malcolm X’s earlier reported remark about his opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and the Rockwells did not, after all, refer to Norman Rockwell, but to “the American Nazi leader,” George Lincoln Rockwell—printed retractions, Rockwell never felt such a response to be good enough, though he didn’t know what else to do about it.
By the beginning of 1965, he was struggling more than usual with his work, mostly advertising, and sounding in his calendar notes as if the subjects were too banal to motivate him. January 11 was “a very very rough day” in the studio, dictating that he take a Miltown after lunch in order to calm down for his afternoon painting. On January 19, his spirits received a lift when Twentieth Century–Fox called him to ask if he would do the posters they needed for the movie they planned to film that summer, Stagecoach. His calendar records the ambivalent, “Thrilled but ———.” By the end of the month, although he is still “very low,” he becomes “all excited” during the family cocktail hour on January 29, when he and Molly discuss “national problems.” His calendar records a string of words: “pictures, Peace corps, Vista, Race Conflict, etc. to hell with mag. work.” On the other side of the page, he pens, “Heard from Stagecoach.”
But if Hollywood is fun, contemporary issues are meaningful, at least that’s what Rockwell’s notes over the next two months seem to imply. On February 4, he writes “Big Day!!! Wonderful mail! Heard from A. Hurlburt at last—astronauts to be published April 20 or May 4. Peace Corps for fall. Hurrah! All so [sic] Vista ok. They are happy with my sketch.” And on February 26, he is pleased with the final oil for the Vista publication, noting in his calendar that “JERRY HELPED a lot.” From March 5, when he mailed the oil sketch of Southern Justice (called Murder in Mississippi by Rockwell), until March 16, when Allen Hurlburt called with his “ok on ‘massacre,’ ” there are no calendar entries. Clearly Rockwell had been anxiously awaiting Hurlburt’s reaction, and the entry on the 16th begins, “Big Big Day!”
Although Hurlburt admired the preliminary oil sketch so much that he suggested publishing it, Rockwell insisted that the art director let him produce a finished painting as well. By the end of April, after Hurlburt spent a few weeks deciding between the two renditions, he phoned Rockwell with the news that everyone at Look preferred the sketch, “quite a change,” the illustrator notes in his calendar. For the first time in his career, both he and an art director agreed that the earlier oil sketch, with its loose brushwork, delivered more impact than the finished oil, and so for the only time in Rockwell’s career, the preliminary study was published while its completed counterpart was not.
Southern Justice, a dramatic tableau of the Mississippi civil
rights workers who were shot during the voting registration drive, appeared in Look on June 29, 1965. As he had with The Problem We All Live With, Rockwell used the dramatic contrast of light and dark to further the theme of racial strife and potential harmony. The white shirt of the white man holding a dying black man contrasts not only with the slain worker’s skin but with the bright blood splashed on the ground and covering the third participant. Painted in colors reminiscent of the old two-tone process—white, red, and brown—the painting powerfully conveys the beauty of the ideals behind the ugly cost of their achievement. Rockwell “tried making [the] Civil Rights men heroic, influenced by Michel Angelo,” as he had written in his calendar several months earlier.
Reaction among Rockwell’s admirers has been mixed on the painting from its publication. Some believe the painting to be strained because, after all, this wasn’t Rockwell’s kind of thing; others find it masterful, a case of Rockwell finally applying his much-vaunted technique to a historically weighty subject. Even the working photos emphasize the new graphic realism: for most settings, Rockwell preferred to use the natural light from his studio’s large north window. But in both Southern Justice and the later New Kids in the Neighborhood, another racially themed painting, he now added floodlights to accentuate the contrast of light and dark, the artificial light heightening the sense of drama.
Norman Rockwell Page 53