American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Rockwell did not leave behind any comments on Alice Brock or Arlo Guthrie and it is not known whether he ever saw the film Alice’s Restaurant. But faced with the film’s giddy apotheosis of youth culture, he might have agreed with Erik Erikson’s student Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who writes in his memoir: “One thinks of the sixties as a time of the young, and it was certainly they who released most of its energies. But not enough attention has paid to the experience of those of us who were adults.”11 Indeed, Rockwell was among those adults who became a political being in the sixties and excoriated the values of an older generation of which he himself was a prominent member.

  Molly Rockwell, in the meantime, made her own contribution to the literature of the counterculture that year. She and Rockwell collaborated on a children’s short story—her first—that ran in the April 1967 issue of McCall’s.12 “Willie, The Uncommon Thrush,” as written by both of them and illustrated by Rockwell, tells the story of a hippie thrush who disavows the song characteristic of his breed. An unrepentant nonconformist, the bird composes his own cadenzas and trills. Gawky and “pigeon-toed,” plagued at times by a “desolating loneliness,” Willie is vaguely reminiscent of Rockwell. “The drive to create had subsided, leaving him empty and bored,” Molly writes of the bird.13

  It is worth noting that Willie the Thrush has the same first name as Willie Gillis, the endearingly boyish soldier who clutched at his package from home in Rockwell’s World War II covers. In the generation since, Willie had become a very different character, one willing to trumpet an ethic of difference.

  THIRTY-ONE

  ANDY WARHOL & COMPANY

  (FALL 1968)

  One afternoon in July 1968 Rockwell picked up the phone in his studio and heard a voice at the other end talking intently about mounting a show of his work. He was taken by surprise and assumed the caller had confused him with Rockwell Kent. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I think you have the wrong artist.”

  He was speaking to Bernie Danenberg, a young art dealer who was in the process of renovating a space in New York that would open that September. His speciality was established American masters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and his personal style was intense. A trim, voluble man in his thirties with oversize glasses, he owned a Bentley convertible (“Ming blue,” as he described it) and was seldom without a cigarette.1

  The next morning Danenberg drove up to Stockbridge with Larry Casper, the low-key manager of his gallery. Rockwell had instructed them to drive straight to the Red Lion Inn, across from his house, where he stored about a dozen paintings. The arrangement allowed him to minimize interruptions from people who insisted on seeing his work. It was peak vacation season in the Berkshires and tourists in wicker chairs were on the inn’s long porch when the dealers arrived. “The paintings were in there, in that room right by the entranceway,” Casper recalled. “Important pictures were hanging all over the place.”2

  Using the pay phone in the lobby of the inn, the dealers called Rockwell and said they were across the street. Could they come over and see him? Within a few minutes, they were striding into his red-barn studio. They explored the place as if it represented a never-excavated archaeological site, seeing treasures everywhere. A small, lovely painting was lying on a table, Lift Up Thine Eyes. Set outside a Gothic church in Manhattan, it portrays a crowd of urbanites rushing by with lowered heads, oblivious to the uplifting message that a young man on a ladder is posting on a sign outside the church. Danenberg offered $2,500 for it. Rockwell told him to just take the painting and he may have actually meant it. “I got paid for it once. I don’t need to be paid again.” He meant he had been paid by the Post.3

  Danenberg was persistent, and by the end of the visit, Rockwell had agreed to not only accept a check for Lift Up Thine Eyes but to allow the dealer to schedule an exhibition of his work at the gallery that October.

  Rockwell still owned most of his paintings, especially the major ones, and Danenberg needed to figure out which pictures to borrow for the exhibition. Rockwell referred him to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, where he kept a few dozen works. Then he made a phone call to Stuart Henry, the museum’s director. “I have a misguided art dealer here who thinks I am an artist,” Rockwell said in his deep voice. “Humor him. Open the museum.”

  * * *

  In earlier years, he had resisted the attention of the art world as much as it had resisted him. From time to time, he had received a solicitous letter from a dealer specializing in American painting, such as Frederic Newlin Price, of the Ferargil Gallery in New York, and he had chosen to back away for reasons that represented a complicated tangle of principle, indecision and insecurity.

  To be sure, there had been exhibitions of Rockwell’s work, but most of them had been organized by the PR department of The Saturday Evening Post, including his one and only show at a major museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1955. That was the show at which a U.S. Marine band had performed in the galleries. The problem was that the Post assembled art shows not to elucidate the strengths of Rockwell’s work but to try to promote the magazine as a bastion of conservative values, values which encouraged a false reading of his work. Of course he could have said no to all that Post promotional nonsense. But saying no was not his forte. Decades ago, he had submitted to his desire for fame and acceptance and he could not reasonably complain about the consequences.

  He liked the idea of the Danenberg show, a show in New York, the much-ballyhooed art capital of the Western world. He already had an audience, of course. An audience numbering in the many millions, and it is not unreasonable to wonder why an artist whose magazine illustrations were known to most everyone in America needed to have a gallery show on Madison Avenue, to sell his paintings to collectors who would take them home and sequester them in living rooms or dining rooms where they would be seen only by the inhabitants of the home and, perhaps, a maid instructed to dust both painting and frame with a soft cloth (and no Windex) once a week.

  But the art world is not just a vehicle of conveyance, of moving paintings from the private space of an artist’s studio to the similarly sealed-off space of a collector’s home. It is also the sum of all the rooms in the world where art is publicly shown, that is, in galleries and museums, in addition to the magazines where it is reproduced and reviewed. It offers any object a meaningful context, the possibility of being judged as art, of being defined in relation to other objects whose aesthetic worth is believed to be knowable.

  In other words, one reason there was no real discussion of the aesthetic worth of Rockwell’s paintings was that he had seldom exhibited them, seldom subjected them to the scrutiny of critics. At this point, his paintings could be had for a song, meaning a few thousand dollars, or even a few hundred dollars. They had not undergone that art-market alchemy whereby an artist publicly exhibits a painting that is purchased by a collector who, after a certain length of time, resells it on the secondary market, perhaps at auction, perhaps for a sizable profit. It is the sale and resale of paintings that establishes their market value.

  Danenberg’s gallery was located at 1000 Madison, at Seventy-seventh Street, next door to the Parke-Bernet auction house. That stretch of Madison Avenue seemed to operate at a calmer pace than the rest of the city. It was lined with boutiques and shops whose windows invited lingering glances at jewelry and designer dresses, at Picasso etchings and star-strewn Miró lithographs and Calder’s bolder, Americanized abstractions, with their clanging reds and yolky yellows. Beyond the display windows, the interiors of the galleries seemed eternally empty, as if each sale netted such a substantial profit it was sufficient to have only a few sales a year.

  Which is not to say that Madison Avenue was stuffy, or reserved for the leisurely peregrinations of tourists. The Leo Castelli Gallery, just around the corner from Danenberg, at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street, was the headquarters of the Pop art movement. That Rockwell was offered a one-man show in New York in 1968 was not a coin
cidence. His reception was helped immeasurably by the advent of Pop art, which had restored realism to the avant-garde and marked an end to the reflexive worship of abstract painting that had prevailed in the art world for nearly half a century.

  * * *

  In order to assemble a Rockwell retrospective at his gallery, Danenberg had to buy or borrow enough pictures to fill two rooms. Rockwell furnished him with information to help him trace paintings and drawings to their owners, who were not officially art collectors so much as people who, for various reasons, happened to have a few Rockwells—his former brother-in-law, his former art editor at the Post, his former neighbors in New Rochelle and Vermont. Danenberg sent a truck up to Stockbridge to retrieve the pictures from the storage racks in Rockwell’s studio and other places he had deposited them.

  Rockwell was not the only illustrator to be “discovered” by the art world in the boundary-crashing sixties. By a nice coincidence, just as he was preparing for his first one-man show in a New York art gallery, a Maxfield Parrish memorial exhibition arrived at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. Parrish had died in 1966, aged ninety-five. Rockwell was asked to review the show for The Berkshire Eagle. During his days at the Art Students League, he had looked to Parrish as a tutelary god, one of the giants of the Golden Age of Illustration, an artist who had furnished beautiful illustrations for Mother Goose and Arabian Nights and other extralarge children’s books that had to be held with two hands.

  Rockwell was casually acquainted with Parrish and once, circa 1938, visited him at the Oaks, his hillside estate near Cornish, New Hampshire. He had asked Parrish why he never came down to New York to attend events at the Society of Illustrators. Parrish was frank. On his one and only visit to the Society, illustrators loudly blamed him for the loss of idealism in American illustration.4

  It was true, to some extent. Parrish was the first major American illustrator to descend from book illustration into the trough of advertising. He became a household name in the twenties, when the Edison Mazda Lamp Works, a lightbulb manufacturer later absorbed into General Electric, published some 20 million Parrish calendars. This was his girls-on-rocks period. Every month, you tore off the previous month’s picture and got a new one—a new girl lolling around between dusk and twilight, as if to suggest that Edison Mazda oversaw not only lightbulbs but the manufacture of sunrise and sunset as well.

  In 1931 Parrish announced that he was done being a purveyor of lightbulbs. His true ambition, he said, was to paint landscapes. He devoted himself to imaginary vistas bathed in hues of coppery orange, sulfuric yellow, and cobalt blue, the last of which he used in such large quantities it came to be known as Parrish blue. The landscapes were published in calendars by Brown & Bigelow, which also published Rockwell’s Boy Scouts calendars. Although Parrish severed his contract with General Electric, his colors retained their distinctly GE quintessence, emitting a light that bore no relation to nature but rather seemed almost electric. During the Depression, his work was seen as an icon of gaudy abundance, and he fell into obscurity.

  Just a few years before he died, Parrish was gratified to find himself rehabilitated by a generation in thrall to his psychedelic colors and unreal worlds. “He was amazingly ubiquitous in college at apartment marijuana parties,” recalled Michael Crawford, the longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker.5 Art historians eager to devise an ancestry for Andy Warhol cited Parrish as a legitimate forebear, mainly because he had smudged the line between art and advertising. Lawrence Alloway, a scholar of Pop art, organized a much-discussed Parrish exhibition at Bennington College in 1964. The following year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased its first-ever Parrish (The Errant Pan), giving the reputation of the ninety-four-year-old artist an instant upgrade.

  When Rockwell visited the Parrish retrospective at the Berkshire Museum that August, he saw a painting he desperately wanted to own. He contacted the Vose Gallery in Boston, which represented the artist’s estate, and purchased A Good Mixer, a small, striking self-portrait that had run on the cover of Life in 1924. You wonder whether it influenced Rockwell’s early self-portrait, Blank Canvas. Parrish portrays himself in stark profile, face to face with a blank canvas, in the tensely expectant slip of time that comes after a palette is loaded with pigment but before the first stroke is applied. With six fresh, blond-haired brushes in one hand, and a medium-sized brush poised for action in the other, he has everything one needs to make a painting. Everything except the foggiest idea of what to paint.

  * * *

  On October 1, after returning with Molly from a last-minute vacation in England and Portugal, Rockwell went down to New York to appear as a guest on The Tonight Show. It was Johnny Carson’s sixth anniversary as host and Rockwell had been commissioned to paint a portrait of him and deliver it on-air as a surprise. The kind of surprise that is scripted down to the last arched eyebrow. Although a tape of the show seems not to exist, one suspects that Rockwell held his own beside his fellow guest, John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, a fixture on the Carson show who somehow maintained his glamorous demeanor as his city slid into financial trouble and became the subject of comedians’ jokes about piled-up trash on the sidewalks.6

  The following week, Rockwell was in New York again for a day of tightly scheduled appointments. He saw Danenberg at the gallery, Allen Hurlbert at Look, and had a portrait session with two acclaimed rock stars: Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield, who hoped to use his work on the cover of their next album. As Kooper recalled in his memoir, “All of a sudden it hit me. Let’s get Norman Rockwell to paint a portrait of me and Michael. Is that fucking beautiful or what?”7

  Kooper, a singer and organist for two rock groups—the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, as well as a legendary studio musician who contributed to work by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones—was then teamed up with the guitarist Michael Bloomfield, recording a series of blues jam sessions. Rockwell agreed to do the cover for their second album, The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, one of the seminal albums of the sixties.

  The portrait session was held in a photography studio at Columbia Records, in midtown Manhattan. Kooper and Bloomfield were excited to meet Rockwell. Bloomfield, who had flown in from San Francisco and was not averse to popping pills, talked a blue streak. He kept saying that Rockwell must, just must, come out to Haight-Ashbury and paint the people there. “He couldn’t really shut up,”8 Kooper recalled years later. “It must have been speed or something.

  “Norman was able to deal with any situation,” Kooper continued. “This was the time of hippies. I thought he fit in quite well with that. He was very calm and nothing fazed him. He photographed us and then off he went.”9 A week later, Kooper was surprised when he took in the mail and found an invitation to a Rockwell exhibition that was opening soon at a gallery on Madison Avenue.

  * * *

  The show at the Danenberg gallery opened on October 21, and stayed up for three weeks. People strolling along Madison Avenue in the cool autumn air could see Saying Grace, with its grandmother and little blond boy praying in a railroad-station luncheonette, displayed in the gallery’s big front window. In other words, a painting of a restaurant storefront visible in a Madison Avenue storefront. Glass upon glass. A reminder of Rockwell’s thematic complexity, an image of boyhood innocence beckoning from the unreachable space behind the glass wall.

  An opening reception was held, a six-to-eight-o’clock affair attended by a throng of illustration people and advertising people. Moët & Chandon had offered to donate champagne for the occasion in exchange for permission to photograph Rockwell sipping on a flute of it, for use in an advertising campaign. Danenberg agreed without consulting Rockwell and a shipment of boxes arrived in short order. (“I had champagne for seven years,” Danenberg recalled gleefully.10) Dressed in his customary tweedy jacket, with a plaid bow tie, Rockwell arrived at the reception half an hour late and, by most accounts, felt embarrassed by the fuss.

  Al Kooper, Norman Rockwell, and Mike Blo
omfield (Photograph by Bob Cato; courtesy of Al Kooper)

  Among the visitors was Al Kooper and his musician-wife, both of them in flamboyant rock-star clothes. They knew no one and made their way around the perimeter of the room, pausing to look at each painting and drawing. “My favorite thing was his painting of Bertrand Russell,”11 Kooper recalled later. “He looked like a chicken. It killed me. That was the high point of my night.”

  When Rockwell spotted Kooper, he pulled him aside and led him to a small office in the back of the gallery. “I don’t really like these things,” Rockwell confided, lowering his voice. “So I think I am going to stay here as much as I can. But I wanted to see you and apologize and say that I am very close to finishing”—finishing his much-delayed album cover, that is.

  * * *

  The show received a friendly enough mention in Grace Glueck’s Friday Art Notes column in The New York Times. “Mad Avenue’s least Minimal show is—brace yourself—a Norman Rockwell retrospective,” she noted. “Some 50 rich, ripe, hand-painted oils by the folksy SatEvePost color illustrator are packing them in.”12 Rockwell spoke to her by phone and she got some good quotations out of him. “I’m overcome,” he told Glueck. “It’s the first real show I’ve ever had in New York. I’ve always wistfully thumbed through art magazines, hoping that even one critic would use me as a whipping boy. But no.”

  In the end, he was not to have his desires fulfilled. The show was ignored by most art critics, except for a lone reviewer at Arts Magazine, who was complimentary. Rockwell promptly sent him a thank-you note. Thomas S. Buechner (pronounced BEAK-ner), the young director of the Brooklyn Museum and a figurative painter himself, wrote a lovely “review” that appeared in The New York Times.13 The article was in fact an advertisement. “I paid for it,” Danenberg confessed later.