The paper’s art critics, in the meantime, remained silent. Rockwell had long been demonized as an entertainer rather than an artist, and neither Hilton Kramer nor John Canaday was willing to dignify his efforts by writing even a thoughtful dismissal. They believed they had to save their time for ennobling encounters with high art. Yet the divide between middlebrow art and high art was never as wide as certain people pretended and Rockwell’s work made a strong impression on countless artists who visited the show and found themselves surprised. Here was one more woefully misunderstood artist.
Willem de Kooning, who was then his midsixties and acclaimed as the country’s leading abstract painter, dropped by the show unannounced. Danenberg, who was there to greet him, recalled that he especially admired Rockwell’s Connoisseur, the one in which an elderly gentleman contemplates a Pollock drip painting. Rockwell had gone to great lengths to replicate the precise chaos of a Pollock canvas and de Kooning noticed. “Square inch by square inch,” he announced in his accented English, “it’s better than Jackson!”14 Hard to know if the comment was intended to elevate Rockwell or demote Pollock.
Warhol also came in to see the show. “He was fascinated,” Danenberg later recalled. “He said that Rockwell was a precursor of the hyper-realists.”15
In the next few years, Warhol purchased two works by Rockwell for his private collection. The first was a smallish portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, from 1963, in which the first lady is a sweet- if somewhat vacant-looking figure with wide-set doe eyes and bouffant hair, a strand of pearls around her neck.16 Warhol also bought a print by Rockwell, Extra Good Boys and Girls,17 in which a red-clad Santa sits on a ladder, plotting his Christmas Eve route on a world map unfurled on the wall behind him. Santa, like Jackie, was known by his first name and no doubt qualified in Warhol’s star-struck brain as a major celebrity.
Rockwell’s art, compared to that of the Pop artists, was not only accessible but actually popular. The Pop artists had admired it to varying degrees since they were kids. In interviews, they cited Rockwell and The Saturday Evening Post as an important influence on their work, as did many other artists who first saw Rockwell’s work in the magazines to which their parents subscribed.
What’s interesting is that by 1968 Rockwell was suddenly in line with a younger generation whose work shared and thus validated his interest not only in realism, but in crisp edges and photographic precision. Much of the new work stood at an opposite pole from the undulating skeins of dripped paint and blazing stimuli of Pollock, whose imagery evoked something cosmic and flowing (the night sky, the beginning of the world), as well as hidden interiors—jangling nerve fibers, axons and dendrites, pure emotion. “We are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings,” Barnett Newman, the talkiest of the Abstract Expressionists, once said.18
Rockwell, by contrast, was always latching onto the legible world, onto disparate objects, each one distinct from the next. The same held true of the Photo-Realists, who emerged circa 1968 as a subset of Pop and whose methods were uncannily similar to those of Rockwell. They, too, had darkrooms built into their studios and made photographs an essential part of their painting process, variously copying them by hand or using (as Rockwell did) a Balopticon to enlarge and project them.
To be sure, many European masters—Manet, Degas, Vermeer, and Canaletto—had used cameras and camera obscuras as painting aids, but the Photo-Realists were probably the first group of painters to publicly admit it, to out the camera in art history. “Everyone had used cameras and denied it,” notes Richard Estes, an early Photo-Realist known for capturing fleeting reflections in the glass and metal surfaces of the city. “I own up to it. I consider my camera a sketchbook. I think that with Rockwell, it’s the same way.”19
Audrey Flack, another pioneering Photo-Realist, then exhibited with French & Co., which was located in the building adjacent to the Danenberg gallery. She had never given much thought to Rockwell but wandered next door to see the show. “I loved it,”20 she said years later. “I thought Rockwell was a terrific painter. You know, Andy Warhol is not a good painter. He is a graphic artist, a designer.” Indeed, Rockwell drew with a fierce concision that harked back to the academic tradition of anatomical correctness, whereas Warhol seized on the basic strategy of graphic design, subordinating drawing to the demands of the quick visual punch.
Put another way, Warhol used the techniques of commercial art to make high art, whereas Rockwell used the techniques of high art to make commercial art.
Of the four dozen paintings in Rockwell’s gallery show, the majority were not for sale. Rockwell had no interest in parting with the ones he owned, in part because Molly had been talking about starting a museum in Stockbridge. A few paintings did get away, at prices that today seem indecently low. The Problem We All Live With was sold for $15,000, to Jack Solomon, who owned the Circle Gallery; he also purchased The Russian Schoolroom for $8,000.21 Larry Casper, the codirector of the Danenberg gallery, bought Night Watchmaker for $6,000. At the time, works by first-tier American realists such as Edward Hopper or George Bellows were selling for ten times that much.
Arthur Teichmann, who was better known as Arthur Murray and had retired from teaching ballroom dancing a few years earlier, saw the show and tried to buy a painting for his wife. There was one he wanted desperately: Girl at Mirror, for which he offered $15,000, but Rockwell declined to sell.22
* * *
Two Tuesdays after the opening of his exhibition, Election Day arrived. Rockwell was assigned to paint a portrait of the new president for Look magazine. He had expected to be painting Hubert Humphrey and remained incredulous that Richard Nixon had won. Rockwell’s editors at Look, despite their generally liberal leanings, were exhorting him to be kind to the president, if only to help them cultivate sources in the new Republican administration. As Rockwell explained, “Look said, ‘We want to have a relationship with the White House, so you better do him looking at his best.’ So boy I fixed him up.”23
Rockwell had painted Nixon three times since 1957 and his previous encounter with him—a portrait session at the Plaza Hotel during the 1968 campaign—had been tense.24 He lost patience when Nixon paused in the hotel hallway to chat up two cleaning women and invite them to visit him at the White House should he win the election. Standing in the carpeted hallway, watching Nixon awkwardly ingratiate himself with the maids, Rockwell thought about the thin line separating a charming gesture from a phony one.
Now, on November 14, Rockwell was driven to New York for a portrait session scheduled for the next day. He had been instructed to meet the president-elect at the Pierre Hotel, in a suite that served as the Nixon transition headquarters. Rockwell never did get in to see him. He waited fruitlessly on the thirty-ninth floor as Nixon remained tied up in a series of meetings until emerging at the end of the day, a Friday, to fly off to his place in Key Biscayne for the weekend. This is not to suggest that Rockwell was the object of a presidential snub. Nixon declined to pose for any portraitist during his presidency.
Faced with an immobile deadline, Rockwell improvised. He painted a head-and-shoulders portrait jiggered together from various visual sources. He basically grafted Nixon’s head—which came from photographs taken by Look a year earlier, during the campaign—onto the shoulders and hands of a man who posed for Rockwell in Stockbridge. What was intended as a portrait of Nixon seated on a couch instead looks like a painting of Nixon’s head visited by an unrelated hand.
Nonetheless, it is relatively flattering, as far as portraits of Nixon go. The thirty-seventh president had a “pear face,”25 as the writer Garry Wills observes, a face that appeared heavier about the mouth and jowls and seemed to recede from you about the brow and eyes. His sloping nose was the stuff of easy caricature. In Rockwell’s portrait, Nixon assumes a partial Rodin-Thinker pose, meaning hand raised to chin, a clever maneuver on Rockwell’s part that allowed him to conceal Nixon’s jowls behind his left hand and give him a more angular and attractive jaw.
/> He delivered the painting to Look on November 25, the Monday before Thanksgiving, and gave thanks that it was finally finished. It was eventually acquired by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., which was desperate to find a noninflammatory likeness of the president to hang in a room previously reserved for Peter Hurd’s portrait of LBJ. When Larry Casper at the Danenberg gallery initially called Rockwell to inform him that the National Portrait Gallery was interested in buying what it called a “done-in-life portrait” of Nixon, the artist was surprised. Nixon, after all, had declined to pose for the portrait and his shoulder and hands belonged to a total stranger. But the curators at the National Portrait Gallery apparently thought the painting was at least in the “done-in-life” ballpark.
“See how much you can get for it,” Rockwell instructed Casper, departing from his customary practice of allowing presidents to keep his portraits of them at no charge. He was pleased when the National Portrait Gallery offered him $6,500, with help from Nixon’s private foundation. “He was happy to let it go,” Casper recalled.26
* * *
With Nixon out of his studio, Rockwell returned to the album cover for Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. He had already sent a charcoal sketch of the two musicians to Columbia Records, seeking approval before continuing. There was always a chance that a client might bail after seeing the sketch. Kooper loved it, even as he acknowledged that his physique could stand some improvement. “At the time I was very thin, like a Bangladesh poster boy,” Kooper recalled. He asked Rockwell if he could paint him “10 pounds heavier.”27 In the end, the album cover of The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper shows the two musicians in cinematic close-up, their bushy-haired heads framed against a sky-blue ground that is unusually loose and brushy for a Rockwell. Bloomfield is on the left, a thin man with pouty lips and a dreamy-stony gaze. He tilts his head toward Kooper, his chin resting lightly on his friend’s shoulder. Kooper appears more assured, larger—Rockwell has indeed added the requested ten pounds. He lifts up his chin as if to glance out from greater heights, or perhaps to better display his black turtleneck and three strands of love beads.
In 1968 Rockwell provided the portrait for the album jacket of The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. (Courtesy of Al Kooper)
The cover can put you in mind of another album that had just been released by Columbia records: Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends, which had come out in April, and whose arresting cover, with its black-and-white portrait by Richard Avedon, resists the psychedelic imagery of its era in favor of the moodily poetic. Rockwell’s album cover shares much with that of Bookends: the same close-up view of two male faces, the same aura of silence.
* * *
On December 31, 1968, Rockwell and Molly flew to Nassau for a vacation. She could see how much he needed a rest. His show at Danenberg had barely closed when Danenberg started pushing him to schedule a second show for the following October. Moreover, Danenberg was imploring him to put aside his commercial work and try painting for himself, try to be an official American Master instead of just an overworked illustrator.
Rockwell said he would try, and maybe he meant it at the time. In the past, his sporadic efforts to make “real art”—to undertake a painting that had not been assigned to him by a magazine or an advertising agency—hadn’t worked out. His last effort had been made a decade earlier, in 1958, when he had publicly announced that he was taking a sabbatical from the Post and going off to be a real painter. There were, to be sure, the portraits he had done in Peggy Best’s sketch class; he had shown them at the Berkshire Museum in 1958. The show had garnered no reviews, except for a piece in Newsweek that carried a painful headline—NORMAN ROCKWELL ASTRAY—and assessed his nonillustration paintings as roughly comparable to “the work of a competent amateur.”28
He felt inadequate enough being an illustrator trying to get his assignments in on time without shouldering the added burden of art. That was the deal with commercial illustration: if you were lucky, you were permanently overbooked with assignments, and deadlines arrived faster than your ability to dispense with them, likes flies too numerous to swat. Rockwell felt as if he was working from “exhaustion to exhaustion,” as he told a local reporter.
Danenberg was thinking about ways to enlarge Rockwell’s reputation as a fine artist, which is what dealers are professionally obliged to do. But Rockwell had no illusions about his longevity. Picasso, Pollock, even Warhol—those guys would still be known in a hundred years, carrying the contorted face of the twentieth century into the future. He could hardly expect the same for himself. Popularity was a losing game in the long run. He had only to think back to his dear friend J. C. Leyendecker, a household name after World War I, to know that even the most dazzling careers in magazine illustration eventually fade to black.
THIRTY-TWO
THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM
(1969 TO 1972)
On February 3, 1969, Rockwell celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. His big plan for the day, he told a reporter, was to get a haircut. He was scheduled to fly down to Cape Kennedy in Orlando the next day, accompanied by Molly, to do some preliminary research on a painting of the moon landing for Look. The haircut got top priority, he joked, because “I don’t want to disgrace Stockbridge down in Florida.” He added that he was very grateful that he still had a few strands of hair to cut.
As Rockwell continued to accept assignments and produce new work, he paid little attention to the older drawings and paintings collecting dust in his studio. Like most artists, his creative relationship with a painting ended when it acquired a frame. Molly Rockwell, on the other hand, had begun to contemplate the possibility of keeping his paintings together in Stockbridge, on display at the Old Corner House, which was about to open to the public.
The project had begun in June 1967, after a developer threatened to despoil the old Dwight House, a handsome white clapboard right on Main Street, at the corner of Elm. His plan was to erect a supermarket on the lot. There is nothing like the mention of a new A&P to spawn alarm among preservationists, and the members of the Stockbridge Historical Society quickly raised $40,000 to buy the house. At first the Old Corner House didn’t have much to do with Rockwell. It was conceived as a home for the historical society, which was then squatting in the basement of the town library. Its collection included papers and assorted objets going back to 1734, when the first white man, the Rev. John Sargeant, settled in Stockbridge and persuaded Indians to join his congregation.1
On May 31, 1969, two summers after it was purchased, the Old Corner House opened quietly to the public. By then Rockwell had agreed to place some thirty-five paintings on “permanent loan,” including his Four Freedoms, Marriage License, Stockbridge—Main Street, and Shuffleton’s Barbershop. Molly Rockwell was on the board of directors (second vice president), along with Mrs. Clement Ogden (president) and Mrs. James Deely (first vice president). Rockwell himself kept an unambiguous distance from the project, declining to serve as an officer. He claimed to find the attention embarrassing and over time visited the historic house as infrequently as possible.
Rockwell appreciated the Old Corner House even less as the number of visitors doubled and then tripled. Thousands upon thousands of people who had Rockwell images lodged in their brains like dimly remembered family photographs would be thrilled to rediscover them and see how large the original paintings were, much larger than a magazine cover. Some of the visitors saw fit, during their trip to Stockbridge, to stroll by Rockwell’s studio in hope of getting a peek at him, requiring him to close his curtains during the day. Some even knocked and tried to say hello, their faces lit up with reverent wonder as he stood in the doorway trying to appear calm. “In the later years, it got to be crazy,” recalled Lamone. “We had to put a sign up outside: ‘Please go to the Old Corner House.’”2
* * *
As Molly Rockwell and the matrons who oversaw the Old Corner House held regular meetings and were pleased to
learn of a steady increase in the number of visitors—admission was a dollar and went toward the upkeep on the house—Bernie Danenberg sat in his gallery on Madison Avenue, pursuing an opposite vision. He wanted to sell as many Rockwell paintings as he could, to disperse them among collectors. In addition to mounting a show at his gallery, he believed he could burnish Rockwell’s salability by arranging for certain tributes and events, the kind that most people assume originate on the basis of pure merit and without interference from the Bernie Danenbergs of this world.
First, he called his friend Harry N. Abrams, the venerable art-book publisher, and proposed Rockwell as the subject of a monograph. The idea was clever, because Abrams was known for its sumptuous monographs on artists ranging from Michelangelo to van Gogh to Jasper Johns and was able to confer the luster of art history on living artists. A suave, stylish man in his sixties, Abrams was London-born and Brooklyn-reared. He had grown up working in his father’s shoe store, an aesthete pondering two-toned oxfords.
In October 1968, on a Sunday afternoon when Rockwell’s show was still up at the gallery, he was called in for a meeting with Abrams. It was on this occasion that Danenberg proposed that he and Abrams jointly publish a Rockwell monograph. The key word was jointly. Abrams recoiled at the notion, and said bluntly, “Bernie, you don’t know anything about the book-publishing business.”3 Abrams, in fact, wanted to do the book on his own. He offered Danenberg a 3 percent commission on sales, suspecting it would satisfy the art dealer’s need for involvement. “I lived for about five years on that commission,” Danenberg later said.4
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 45