American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Despite the hucksterish advertisements and much-derided status of correspondence schools in general, the Famous Artists School had something substantial to offer.3 In coming years, it would instruct tens of thousands of children and adults in the rudiments of art, illustration, and cartooning, helping to raise the level of visual literacy in America. Its students ranged from housewives and small business executives to Carol Burnett, Tony Curtis, and museum founder Joseph Hirshhorn, all of whom received in the mail overly large, four-ring binders and twenty-four lessons intended to make them proficient at drawing the figure, the foundation of all art education.

  Veterans could use their G.I. benefits to cover the tuition, which was initially two hundred dollars, payable in monthly installments. It entitled students to have their work graded and critiqued on a regular basis. They would mail their finished assignments to a team of artist-instructors who would “correct” them on an overlay of tracing paper, then promptly send them back. The enterprise was intriguing enough to inspire J. D. Salinger to make the protagonist of his short story, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” just such a mail-order instructor, poring over student work and laboring to draw “recognizable trees” on overlay paper.4

  The Famous Artists School could have been called, if factual accuracy had been the goal or even a vague concern, the Somewhat Famous Artists School. Rockwell was the only household name among the original faculty members, a group of accomplished illustrators who were more familiar to the profession than to the public. Most of them lived near the school’s headquarters in Westport, on the fashionable Connecticut shoreline, and turned out illustrations for the Post or Collier’s or Ladies’ Home Journal. Some (such as Stevan Dohanos) favored Rockwell-style genre scenes, but others pursued more glamorous subjects, such as sinewy cowboys (Harold von Schmidt); race cars (Peter Helck); stylish mother-daughter couples (Al Parker); or sexy blondes with powdered noses and too much lipstick (Jon Whitcomb).

  The Famous Twelve in 1949. First row, left to right: Fred Ludekens, Al Dorne, Norman Rockwell; second row: Peter Helck, Al Parker, Jon Whitcomb, Stevan Dohanos; back row: Ben Stahl, Austin Briggs, Harold von Schmidt, Robert Fawcett, and John Atherton (Courtesy of the Famous Artists School)

  Albert Dorne, who founded the school and served as its president, was a decade younger than Rockwell and not nearly as down-to-earth. He belonged to the tradition of the illustrator as self-made playboy and nightclub fixture. Raised in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he saw himself as a dashing exemplar of the American dream. In photographs Dorne is a short, stocky man with slicked-back hair, heavy caterpillar eyebrows and the inevitable cigar. His studio, at 322 East Fifty-seventh Street, was in one of those top-of-the-line New York artists’ buildings with cavernous rooms and double-height windows. From there he commuted back and forth to his school in Westport in a Mercedes sedan whose varnished walnut dashboard was conveniently equipped, in the case of an impromptu cocktail party or a sudden desire for self-obliteration, with a pull-out bar. He made his fortune drawing advertisements and created his most winning advertising campaign on behalf of himself—it was Dorne who came up with the clever catchphrase, “We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw,” one of the most effective pitches of the fifties.

  Dorne initially tried to launch his correspondence school under the auspices of the Society of Illustrators, where he was elected president in April 1947. When the plan failed, he called up Rockwell, whom he knew casually from the society, and proposed that they start their own institution. Rockwell, he believed, could imbue a school with both star power and an aura of integrity. Dorne thought of him as a genteel figure, an “old-fashioned Boy Scout type of guy” who did not curse, except for an occasional “damn.”5

  Initially, Dorne offered Rockwell and his fellow faculty members stock in the school, instead of money. It would turn out to be a lucrative arrangement, although the payout did not come until much later, until 1961, when the school became publicly owned.6 For now, Rockwell’s main responsibility was to furnish educational material for the home-study course books and pose for publicity photographs.

  In his letters to Rockwell, Dorne addressed him as “Dear Professor” and signed off with “love and kisses.”7 His affection for Rockwell was genuine, if clouded with professional jealousy. In promotional literature for the school, Dorne identified himself as “a brilliant illustrator” while characterizing Rockwell as merely “popular.” Once, in the middle of a squash game with Elliot Caplin, the younger brother of cartoonist Al Capp, Dorne mentioned having heard a rumor about a new comic strip. “I hear you’re doing something with Normie,” Dorne remarked cuttingly. “It takes Normie a week to draw a finger nail!”8

  Rockwell refrained from publicly criticizing Dorne’s work, which leaned toward the cartoony. “Dorne was not chained by the classical traditions of art production,” as David Apatoff notes in his monograph on the artist.9 He forsook the slow-drying medium of oil on canvas for the quicker satisfactions of colored ink and paper. He insisted it was foolish to hire models and have them pose when you could obtain more-than-adequate human figures by copying pictures from a Sears catalog. A proto-Warhol, he claimed that the greatest art was making money, although he was no slouch in the draftsmanship department either. His elongated figures and jumpy crowds would later be held up as an important influence on a generation of Mad magazine artists.10

  * * *

  Rockwell had one close friend on the faculty, John Atherton, who would accompany him on the trip to Westport for meetings that were held perhaps two or three times a year. He always went by taxi and had the car wait until he was done, so he and Atherton could get back to Arlington, a nearly four-hour ride, on the same day.11 Rockwell was also fond of Al Parker, whom he met through the school, and whom he treated with great professional chivalry. “While the rest of us are working knee-deep in a groove you are forever changing and improving,” Rockwell wrote to Parker in 1949, going on to compliment a recent (unnamed) illustration of his.12

  Although Rockwell was the public face of the Famous Artists School, he had little desire to teach. He certainly wasn’t trying to spread a certain art philosophy or win acolytes. Rather, he had always been content to follow in the tradition of Howard Pyle, who articulated the rules that remained dominant during the Golden Age of Illustration. His approach came out of high art, out of academic history painting, which assumed that an artist was steeped in knowledge of his subject. Pyle’s love of verisimilitude seemed obsolete to a generation of younger illustrators who put a premium on efficiency. Rockwell was working at the end of a tradition—not starting a new one.

  Moreover, Rockwell had little faith in his ability to convey anything instructive in words. Like most painters, he thought of line and color as his preferred language. If he had been able to express himself fully by speaking or writing, he wouldn’t have had to sink his life savings into the construction of studios and the constant replenishment of his supply of exorbitantly priced tubes of cadmium yellow and cadmium red.

  When Rockwell wrote up his ideas and strategies for a chapter of the Famous Artists home-study course books, he was obliged to adopt a practical tone. This came to him naturally. He exhorts students to draw from life models at every opportunity. He recommends the use of costumes and props. Proffering a bit of advice not likely to be widely followed, he urges: “Keep a list of people you know who have guns, stuffed animals, sporting equipment or other props you are likely to need in your pictures.”13

  At Dorne’s request, Rockwell visited New York the first week of October 1948, to help promote the opening of their school. Interviewed by a syndicated columnist in the restaurant of the New Weston Hotel, he neglected to mention the Famous Artists School, or perhaps the reporter just skipped over it because he sensed it wasn’t foremost in Rockwell’s thoughts. Puffing on his pipe, speaking “softly and hesitantly” and sipping on a cup of tea, Rockwell came across as the anti-Dorne. He volunteered that he disliked nightclubs. He expressed
an impatience with New Yorkers in general, saying he found them too guarded, too attached to their social poses and masks, to make for good models. The exception, he said, were “underprivileged slum dwellers,” who are less practiced at self-presentation and more likely to express a flicker of character in their faces.14

  When his interviewer tried to goad him into attacking Cubism and Surrealism, Rockwell politely declined. He did not think of modernism as an infidel movement that threatened what he had. To the contrary, part of him wished he could be a modernist, lead a freer life, escape from the straitjacket of rules he imposed on himself and his art. “Every time they come out with a new art movement,” he joked to his interviewer, “I try grimly to follow it. However, when I put brush to canvas, alas, it always comes out Rockwell.”15

  EIGHTEEN

  GRANDMA MOSES

  (1948 TO 1949)

  On February 14, 1948, Rockwell was in Kansas City, Missouri, visiting with Joyce C. Hall, a tall, soft-spoken man with a bald pate and wire-rimmed glasses. His company was on Grand Avenue, in the Overland Building, and he considered it a point of pride that he had his lunch every day in the sixth-floor cafeteria. A high school dropout from Nebraska, Hall traced the origins of his company to the moment in 1910 when he arrived at the Kansas City train depot carrying two shoe boxes filled with picture postal cards. That was his entire inventory: postcards which he would sell out of his room at the YMCA.

  Later, after he became a celebrated businessman, Hall spoke about his greeting-card company as if it was right up there with the telegraph or the telephone as a crowning achievement of modern communications. He maintained that greeting cards kept Americans connected in an era of mobility and constant change. His own life lacked stability; he could not forgive his father, a Methodist minister, for saddling him with a girlish name and running off. Soon after, he began collecting picture postcards and acquired them obsessively, as if to fill a void.

  Hall had brought Rockwell out to Kansas City to help garner publicity for a new project.1 In contrast to his usual greeting cards, most of which featured pastel-colored roses and pansies drawn by staff artists, he was inaugurating a deluxe line of cards known as the Hallmark Gallery Artists Group. Rockwell agreed to create four humorous paintings in time for Christmas, the most popular of which would show Santa Claus snoozing on the job as his staff of craftsy elves took over for him. His cards, according to Hallmark ads, put Rockwell in the company of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and other artists tapped for the series. YULE CARDS TO DISPLAY GREAT ART, trumpeted a headline in The Washington Post, which explained that the project was “designed to bring fine art into the American home” for prices starting at ten cents.2

  Rockwell displays his Christmas card designs to Joyce C. Hall, on February 14, 1948, in Kansas City. (Courtesy of Hallmark Cards)

  It’s been said that Hall was the first person to put famous art on Christmas cards, but that is incorrect. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, for instance, was already selling a good number of radiant madonnas by Raphael or Fra Filippo Lippi every December. What set Hall apart, by his own admission, was that he understood the possibilities that inhered in display fixtures. He credited his success to his patented “Eye-Vision” contraption, a walnut rack that allowed stationery shops to display his greeting cards standing up, or rather tilted at a natural reading angle, instead of lying flat on countertops or concealed in a drawer.3 In 1947 Hall acquired the right to reproduce Grandma Moses’s snowy farm scenes on Christmas cards. She was a runaway marketing phenomenon, and he moved 16 million of her cards that year.

  * * *

  It was Hall who introduced Rockwell to Grandma Moses. She lived on a dairy farm in upstate New York, in a hamlet called Eagle Bridge, about twenty miles from Rockwell’s house in Vermont. He routinely drove by her house on his way to the train station in Troy. At the time they met, Rockwell was fifty-four and she was about to turn eighty-eight. But he had been painting much longer than she had. As nearly everyone in America then knew, Anna Mary Robertson Moses was a late bloomer.

  “Grandma,” as the whole country called her, had taken up art at age seventy-six, in her idle widowhood. At the time she was living with her youngest son, Hugh Moses, and his wife, Dorothy, who had moved in with her to take over the management of her farm. She did her painting in the upstairs bedroom, turning out pictures of what she referred to as “old-timey things.”4

  Officially, she was a primitive artist, unschooled in art and its history. But she did have an elite art dealer. In 1940 she had been given her first show at the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan. It was owned by Otto Kallir, an Austrian-Jewish émigré who had shown modern art at his gallery in Vienna until the Nazis shut him down. In New York, he alternated shows of self-taught artists with those of Oskar Kokoschka, Lovis Corinth, and the German Expressionists, first-rate modernists whom Grandma Moses came to overshadow in terms of popularity. A tiny woman who stood just over five feet, she enchanted the public with her plainspoken style and stories of farm life. Here was a poet of rural America who seemed to represent a new kind of master: sane, practical, fond of making raspberry jam.

  A few months after they met, Hall asked Rockwell to participate in the elaborate festivities he was planning for Grandma’s upcoming birthday. At the time, his new line of Christmas cards was about to go on sale and he was trying to drum up national publicity. Naturally, there was no possibility of media appearances by most of the fifty-odd artists who appeared on his cards—El Greco and Gauguin were dead and Picasso might as well have been, considering his inconvenient Paris address. But Rockwell and Grandma Moses had the advantage of being accessible. Hall anointed them the twin stars and public face of the Hallmark Gallery Artists Line.

  The story ran in papers across the country: ROCKWELL IS BAKER FOR GRANDMA MOSES, one headline read.5 Rockwell purportedly spent Labor Day weekend designing a cake—a white-sponge, seven-layer confection that measured two feet across, weighed fifty-five pounds, and contained 228 eggs.6 It was actually baked by the pastry chef at the Green Mountain Pine Room, in Arlington, one of Rockwell’s haunts. Frank Hall, who owned the restaurant, was not related to Joyce Hall, except by virtue of their business transactions and Hallmark’s willingness to pick up the tab for Grandma’s elephantine cake. It was decorated with a scene from one of her Hallmark cards, “Bringing in the Xmas Trees,” complete with ice skaters and horse-drawn sleighs rendered in the slippery, hard-to-control medium of cake frosting.

  September 7, 1948, fell on a Tuesday. When Rockwell arrived in Eagle Bridge that morning, the two front parlors in Grandma Moses’s house were mobbed. Her son Hugh, a farmer, helped Rockwell maneuver the bulky cake out of the car and through the narrow door of the farmhouse. The guests included Joyce Hall from Kansas City; Otto Kallir, the art dealer with the Austrian accent from Manhattan; and a throng of reporters and photographers.7 As Grandma entertained her guests, a cameraman from Paramount shot footage for a newsreel. “Every visitor was treated to a piece of a seven-layer cake brought by Norman Rockwell,” The New York Times reported the next morning, making him sound like the kind of guest who never went anywhere without bringing a homemade dessert.8

  Although their acquaintanceship began as a PR stunt, Rockwell genuinely liked Grandma Moses. She was the only female artist he ever counted as a friend. Her advanced age removed any risk of sexual entanglement and allowed him to feel comfortable in her presence. He gave her his highest compliment when he gushed to a reporter, “Grandma Moses is the cleanest-looking woman I have ever seen. Her skin is clear as a young girl’s.”9

  It amused him to recall the first time he asked to see her studio. She flatly declined, joking that no respectable woman would allow a gentleman in her bedroom. Rockwell eventually did gain access to her sanctum. Instead of standing at an easel, Grandma worked sitting down at a table in front of a window. Rockwell told her she was doing herself a grave disservice by allowing light (southeastern) to pour into the room and cast shadows all over the plac
e. He also expressed his disapproval of her thrifty materials—she favored pint-size cans of regular house paint.

  He sketched a wonderful portrait of her at work, depicting her in perfect profile, a studious woman sitting at her little table, a coffeepot at her feet. He was surprised to realize that “she drank black coffee incessantly.”10 When his drawing was published in a magazine, Grandma complained. She was unhappy about the presence of the coffeepot, not caring to disclose her caffeine habit to all the country.

  * * *

  By October, the summer people had vanished from the Vermont hills and the air was surprisingly chilly. On some mornings, when Rockwell walked along the short path from his house to his red-painted studio in the yard—always at the same hour, shortly before eight o’clock—the grass was stiff with frost and he could see his breath. The studio was his true home, but it no longer offered the usual sense of refuge. Mary’s drinking problem could no longer be ignored and was increasingly the topic of town gossip.

  That month, Mary appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, as the protagonist of another illustrator’s work. George Hughes, a neighbor in Arlington of whom she was fond, specialized in light comedies that had a period look. Mary posed for his cover, Readying for First Date, which shows a mother (in cinch-waisted green dress, her hair pulled back in a ponytail) in her teenage son’s unkempt bedroom, helping him with his bow tie.11 Inside the magazine, in an editor’s note, the models are identified as Mary and Tommy Rockwell. It unsettled Rockwell, perhaps because he had failed to give Mary a similarly prominent role in his own work. So far, the only cover in which she could be conclusively identified was The Gossips, which had appeared earlier that year and remains his most mordant cover. It features five rows of adult heads—a frieze of busybodies, most of them middle-aged and lumpy-looking and taking a bit too much pleasure in receiving and repeating a rumor that in the end circles back to the original busybody. Rockwell said he included a likeness of Mary to dispel any suspicion among his neighbors that he was mocking them.