Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  He sharply informed the entrepreneurs who wanted to expropriate the Glen Canyon painting that he had no interest whatsoever in participating in such an enterprise. And to the hundreds of other random entreaties, like the one that came complete with a free skillet, he answered gently that he appreciated the gift and, in the case of the skillet, would certainly fry his morning eggs in it, but he believed participating as a celebrity breakfast eater on behalf of the Poultry and Egg National Board too gimmicky, especially since he didn’t know where he stood on the cholesterol controversy. A few months later, he equally emphatically answered Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo: while he was greatly honored by the invitation to be fêted in the mayor’s city, he was behind in his work and unable to attend the planned reception. Rizzo’s strong support of the Vietnam War, at the least, would have shored up Rockwell’s resolve to say no.

  By the end of 1969, after a particularly hardworking year, Rockwell was ready for another extended vacation. He and Molly traveled to Israel, where he painted the troubled Christmastime mix of soldiers and worshippers in Jerusalem. The travel plans to get there were made impulsively, Christopher Niebuhr remembers from a story his mother told him. Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr had first met the Rockwells in the early sixties, when the theologian spent summers in Stockbridge to undergo therapy at Austen Riggs for poststroke impairments. Within a few years, they established a year-round residence. In 1969, Ursula joined Mayor Lindsay’s ten-day trip to Israel, where she was appointed to an international task force on the future of Jerusalem. Later in the year, when a professor from Hebrew University visited Stockbridge the day after Thanksgiving, Ursula sponsored a luncheon for him and invited Molly.

  Before he left, the man handed out business cards to everyone, telling them to call him if they ever visited Israel. Almost before he had a chance to arrive home, Molly asked Ursula if she thought it would be acceptable to phone the kind professor and ask for help locating a hotel in Jerusalem so that she and Norman could spend Christmas there.

  While on their impulsive winter holiday, Rockwell sketched a scene of soldiers and citizens in Bethlehem keeping watch over the Holy Wall on Christmas Eve. He finished the painting at home, framing it before he sent it to Look, just as he had done to all his magazine illustrations throughout the years. “A picture without a frame is like a man without a collar. Besides, it helps the picture and makes me feel it is really finished,” he rationalized when a journalist during this period asked him about the unusual practice. During the exchange, the interviewer informed him that he had been compared with Rembrandt, to which Rockwell responded, “Rembrandt must turn over in his grave.” Yet he had cannily invited such overblown compliments with his earlier remarks to journalists that Michelangelo was an illustrator, after all, when he painted the Sistine Chapel.

  The prices that the original oils for the Saturday Evening Post covers continued to bring as the seventies began astounded their painter, who expressed amused pleasure and surprise when the topic was discussed in public, and wry dismay at home about the way he used to dispose of the originals without a thought as to their value. (Molly was even more distressed at the casualness with which the painter had dispersed his life’s earnings.) During the summer of 1970, one of his paintings brought $27,000. Another measure of his marketable status in 1971 was demonstrated when Endorsements International, Ltd., polled seven thousand advertisers to compile a list of the one hundred “most wanted” celebrity endorsers of the past twenty-five years. Although Rockwell had never had an agent, he had succeeded remarkably well in promoting his name and image, effectively assuring himself a Rolodex card on the desks of ad agents and art directors. Now, his lifetime efforts paid off. Show business personalities dominated the list with fifty-one names. The runner-up category was sports, with eighteen winners. The art world was represented by just six celebrities—three cartoonists: Milton Caniff, Al Capp, and Charles Schulz; and three artists: Salvador Dalí, Grandma Moses, and Norman Rockwell.

  In the fall, the event Rockwell had so eagerly anticipated at last occurred—Harry Abrams’s publication of the first major monograph on the artist. Thomas Buechner’s text intelligently made the case for the role of illustrator as artist, nimbly sidestepping the now-aged clichés on the question of categories, and plunging into an examination of Rockwell as a modern-day American genre painter, inheritor of the Dutch seventeenth-century tradition. (A few years later, the journalist Sam Walton wrote similarly of Rockwell’s strong narrative references to Dutch Masters, including Cornelis de Man, as well as the Dickensian Pre-Raphaelites from England.) Neither hagiographic nor breezily condescending, Buechner, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, spoke more insightfully than any critic had thus far. And he spoke from the authority of a major American museum—although Brooklyn’s very city affiliation implied, to many Americans (the art world no exception), the populism that made Rockwell appeal to the unwashed masses.

  The reviews of Buechner’s book made much of the nostalgia wave sweeping the country. A similar phenomenon would usher in another period of retrospective chic for the artist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when Rockwell would again become a fashionable commodity to the art world and the educated public both. (To the middlebrow citizenry, he had never been anything less, which, to the rest of the population, epitomized the problem.) The early seventies were seen as a period when it was suddenly acceptable to turn to the past, before Vietnam and before the supposed divisiveness of the sixties, and to laud an art that dared to represent people, not the sacrosanct inner visions of the artist’s mind. Such retrospective scrutiny lived on the edge of cheap chic, however, and critics such as John Canaday of The New York Times didn’t hesitate to sneer at the lack of knowledge of the real world that they considered Rockwell’s work to convey. And they sneered, at least implicitly, at the people who could consider such painting “art.”

  The period between World War II and 1970 had fused the lessons of European Modernism to the fiery nativism of American iconoclasts, resulting in an abstract art that commanded center stage on the world art scene. Although Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism had conquered the art world by 1950, the intimidation and boredom of ordinary Americans by the art world, and their confusion at what they were being asked to look at in museums—Conceptualism, Pop Art, Minimalism—wasn’t complete until twenty years later. Even in 1970, few middle-class American citizens possessed the self-confidence or training, by education or on their own, to feel comfortable asserting their preference for figurative painting. Yet a full decade earlier, representation had begun to stake its claim again, and now, as the seventies began, a new interest in Rockwell’s work reflected such a shift in critical tastes, trickling down to the supposed unknowing masses.

  And Rockwell’s savvy response to the turmoil of the 1960s had encouraged the cognoscenti as well to give the elderly statesman of American illustration a second look. It was Rockwell, after all—he of the courage to paint radical new images when others would have been resting on their laurels—who believed in the future that the hippies wanted to construct. “We should have great confidence in the present generation of young people who are, I think, the very best we have produced—long hair and all. Who is to say that one of these hippies won’t be a genius of the future?” Just as he had in the 1950s, so now he reassured the nation that its kids were more than okay—they were swell, and they would lead us into the future assuredly. Such public affirmation was generous, when this was the same generation, after all, that had lampooned him in Mad magazine a few years earlier, and that by and large thought him irrelevant. More impressive still, Rockwell was willing to alienate the public who depended on him to counter the very seemingly wanton culture he had just endorsed. From the beginning of his career until its twilight, the nation’s children packed the strongest psychological punch with the illustrator.

  Buechner’s book was a tome, weighing in at thirteen and a half pounds, and costing sixty dollars—after an early promotional printi
ng of sixty thousand copies priced at forty-five dollars sold out within one week. The sales were undoubtedly furthered by the publicity tour Rockwell himself made through Washington, Philadelphia, Dayton, and Los Angeles. In November and December, he embarked on a fast-paced promotional circuit, appearing on Joey Bishop’s, Dick Cavett’s, and Dinah Shore’s shows. Ambling onto the stage in his trademark pigeon-toed, side-to-side fashion, the painter combined his real affection for the American people with an impressive self-possession that showed the strength behind the country-boy charm. Cooperating pleasantly with requests to recite the Mamaroneck fight song, he time and again evinced his near magical ability to seduce the listener with his supreme self-confidence, even as, at the same time, he managed to make the same admirers eager to protect him from what seemed his odd vulnerability.

  But now, the sadness that acute commentators had always noticed flitting through what they called his melancholy eyes seemed more often on display. He explained that he “no longer” believed that he would bring back the Golden Age of Illustration, though he still began each painting with the hope that this would be his best yet. And he managed, as always, to speak an important self-truth while clothing it in self-effacing charm: “I’m no artist, I’m an illustrator,” he told interviewers. “When anyone challenges me on that, I always want them to win the argument.” Still, he admitted that he worked “from exhaustion to exhaustion,” or from fatigue to fatigue, as he told others. He continued to paint seven days a week, making it to the studio by eight forty-five most mornings, his day over at five. His work was disrupted only by the lunch break he’d share with Molly, followed by a 4.7-mile bike ride up some fairly steep hills, which had helped get his weight down to his current 115 pounds. “The townspeople worried a bit about Norman and Molly out there on the roads. They were up there in age, and they seemed totally unaware of their infirmities. So we all watched out for them, and we’d drive particularly slowly around curves when we thought it was their time to be riding,” Mary Quinn, a townsperson and, later, Rockwell’s nurse, explains. Rockwell’s calendar entries around this period show him deeply aware of the fragility of age and its discontents. Professional associates are now cited by the dates of their funerals, with Rockwell inevitably marking the day only as “sad” or “depressing.”

  The early seventies also represented the last stage of the great experiment—the innovation—that the Famous Artists’ School had embodied. For twenty years, the institution had provided services that, until the last few years, the instructors could pride themselves on. But when its founder, Al Dorne, died, the institution was bought by a noneducational company whose main business was plumbing materials. Rockwell was urged to sell his stocks while he could still make money; listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the stocks he held were worth a couple of million dollars. Molly begged him to at least unload some of his holdings; the bleak financial future of the school was becoming clearer by the day. According to family stories, however, he was also told that to do so would hurt any chance of the organization surviving, and so he held off. In the end, Rockwell lost his entire Famous Artists’ School fortune, as the new owners ran the school into the ground and it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, leaving a gutted institution for its next intrepid and this time honorable buyer, Cortina, who tried to revive the once-proud enterprise.

  31

  The Light Recedes

  As much as the attention to his decades-long career pleased Rockwell, it also scared him, because it suggested that his tenure as an artist was a thing of the past. Certainly his fan mail continued unabated; one particularly lengthy letter, in contrast to those asking for autographs or extra paintings he might have hanging around the house, requested that the artist help spring the writer from jail at the State Correctional Institution at Huntington, Pennsylvania. Rockwell wrote back a firm but polite rejection, claiming to be in no position financially or otherwise to help, and ending with “I am very sorry, but I think I should tell you these facts.” More conventional signs of his continued popularity abounded as well: requests poured in for his $5,000 portraits, ranging from Ross Perot to Tennessee Ernie Ford.

  When Rockwell agreed to a commission, he invariably warned of his overly full schedule and the probability of delays. He continued to accept advertising jobs, believing the pay to compensate for the unchallenging assignments, and he allowed reputable companies, such as Parker Brothers games, to license the use of his name. College students wrote him about the seminar papers they were delivering on “The Genre of Norman Rockwell,” and civil defense lawyers in Mississippi sent him fan mail about how his paintings on civil rights had moved them more than anything they’d ever seen. Predictably, he fell behind and sought creative ways out of his obligations. C.O.R.E., the Congress of Racial Equality, a leftist civil rights organization established for the “liberation of Black People,” asked him to design a Christmas card for them; instead, he sent them his potent, surprising painting of two slain civil rights leaders, Blood Brothers, a black and a white worker, lying on the ground, smothered in blood. They loved the gift, but they (and Rockwell) thought it too grisly to use as a Christmas card.

  Blood Brothers had actually been completed several years earlier for Look’s series of articles on the nation’s racial struggles, but the editorial board could never quite agree to use it. First painted as the slaying of two friends, one black, one white, in a city ghetto, Rockwell changed it at the magazine’s request to two Marines in uniform, killed in a Vietnam village. His idea for the painting was the visual mixing of the blood flowing from both men, reminding the audience that skin color didn’t affect the deepest levels of human connection. When feedback from Look included the comments from a black editor and ex-soldier who felt the painting was “patronizing,” and that Rockwell had failed to show the important point—that in Vietnam, there was no racial prejudice—the artist, deeply frustrated at what he assumed was his untutored awareness of such matters, wrote to the Harvard psychiatrist and author Robert Coles for advice.

  Coles, a student of Erik Erikson, had enlisted Rockwell’s help for a book he published in 1968, Dead End School, a study of poor urban black children and their families, and the effects of their attending overcrowded schools. The book was written to further the aims of school desegregation. Rockwell accompanied Coles throughout the Southeast, and while the psychiatrist interviewed families, Rockwell drew scenes from the children’s lives. Well received, the book bonded the two men. Coles especially would later express his pleasure at their friendship, noting the curiosity the artist displayed for everything around him, and his extreme awareness of the feelings of the often downtrodden people they were dealing with. “I was just truly impressed at his intelligence and sensitivity to people,” Coles recollects.

  Rockwell had written Coles a worried inquiry about how to handle the disagreement at Look over his Blood Brothers. His deep concern about causing offense or pain to others occupies the foreground of his inquiry: “The reason I am writing to you is because I know you really have a deep understanding of the negro’s feeling about the civil rights issue. Could I impose on you to look at the two photographs and perhaps you have some suggestion as to what the negro editor felt was condescending.” Coles, who believes that Rockwell was deeply, vitally committed to racial equality, failed to offer sage enough advice for the painter to salvage the commission, though he placated him sufficiently that in later years Rockwell said simply, to anyone who asked, that “Look lost its nerve.”

  By the fall of 1971, Rockwell was exhausted from all the attention and from his never-failing hard work. He had not paused even during the hot summer, including the August afternoon when he did Frank Sinatra’s portrait, one of the first paintings to show the dramatic decline of his abilities. He continued executing various portrait commissions he’d accepted, including one of actor Walter Brennan, for the National Hall of Fame and Western Heritage. The loosely painted result seems more the product of a shaky hand than a deliberate stylistic choice.
The artist agreed to be the star of a documentary half-hour television special shot in Stockbridge, and sponsored by the Arrow shirt company, known decades before as much for J. C. Leyendecker’s art as for the clothes they manufactured. Such events tired him quickly these days, and at the end of November, replying to the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal about yet another request for an illustration, he explained that his doctor had told him that he must take a vacation, and that he and Molly were going to Little Dix in the Virgin Islands for about a month.

  Pictures of the couple in Little Dix show them cavorting like youngsters. This resort area, located on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, was their favorite vacation spot. But by the beginning of 1972, he was back to the grueling pace that even Molly had been unable to reduce. Rockwell began the year by getting his biannual duty to the Famous Artists’ School out of the way; but upon his return on January 18 from Westport, he recorded his belief that the school was “fading fast.” So was he, if his new tack of hiring someone to drive him so he could sleep in the back of the car from Stockbridge to Westport was any measure of wear and tear.

  During the early part of this same year that, at Rockwell’s insistence, the Famous Artists’ School would create its last ad using the illustrator’s name, a large-scale show, sponsored by the Danenberg Gallery and meant to complement Buechner’s monumental book, opened at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of the Arts. It would tour nationally through the end of April 1973, covering nine cities over a period of a year and a half. “Norman Rockwell: A Sixty-Year Retrospective” was, eerily, positioned culturally and among the institutional art world almost exactly as the mammoth retrospective of 1999 would be over twenty-five years later. Even some of the critics would be the same: Peter Schjeldahl wrote a perceptive and generous appraisal of the Danenberg show for The New York Times; over a quarter of a century later, he would reprise his criticism for The New Yorker. Schjeldahl cites the “phenomenal ‘Rockwell revival’ ” and the opportunity that a Manhattan audience now has to “reappraise the achievement of this prolific, all-American master illustrator.” Audiences would crowd the show; the critics would be wildly mixed in their reactions. In their almost exclusive regard of his subject matter and neglect of his painterly skill or technique, both audiences and critics showed how well they had absorbed the lessons of the abstract art world of the forties and fifties. Paradoxically, the very absence of overt subject matter in postwar art had trained the eye to assume that innovative abstraction was its own reward. Pronouncing on Rockwell, spectators no longer had the vocabularies to discuss narrative painting.