American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

As the two men conferred on the details of the Rockwell monograph, Rockwell stood off to the side of the room as if the project had nothing to do with him. He did not even request royalties. Everyone agreed that his role in the book would be minimal. Of course he had made the art, but never mind. “Why should he get anything?” Danenberg asked years later with apparent sincerity. “The book was my idea and I got Tom Buechner, my friend, to do the text.”

  Indeed, Buechner, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, was commandeered to produce an authoritative essay. He was perfect for the task, an accomplished art historian and figurative painter whose views were appealingly iconoclastic. Rejecting the familiar narrative that reduces modern art to the birth and unfurling of abstraction, he believed realist painting had been criminally neglected at least since the Armory Show of 1913 and that Rockwell deserved much better treatment.

  It might seem odd that a museum director would write such a book promoting an artist who was not part of the museum’s collection. Solution: add a Rockwell to the collection before anyone notices the absence. In January 1969 Tattoo Artist was delivered by truck from the Danenberg gallery to the unloading dock of the museum.5 Trustees voted to add it to the permanent collection one week later. That was the painting, from 1944, that is set in a seamy tattoo parlor, where a sailor is having “Betty” inscribed on his left arm by a male tattooist who is seen crouching from behind on a crate. The sailor’s arm is covered with a list of crossed-out names belonging to former girlfriends: Sadie, Rosietta, Ming Fu, Mimi, Olga, and Sing Lo, a testament to his numerous romances.

  Tattoo Artist, by the way, was a perfect acquisition for the Brooklyn Museum. It is among Rockwell’s most urban works, and he had done the research for it in an actual tattoo parlor on New York’s Bowery. The painting’s relevance would only increase in the twenty-first century, as tattoos spread from the bulging muscles of Navy seamen to the yoga-toned flesh of a generation of hipsters.

  * * *

  Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator was published in October 1970, two years after the show at the Danenberg gallery. The first book on Rockwell to include the word artist in the title, it weighed more than a chubby baby (thirteen pounds) and measured a foot by a foot and a half. It was Abrams who had forced the word artist into the title. “Norman maintained he wasn’t an artist,” recalled Bob Abrams, son of Harry and himself an art-book publisher, “and there was concern over the title of the book. He considered himself a working stiff.”6 With 588 illustrations, the book was one of those art-book behemoths whose exaggerated size is intended to signal the promise of a big art experience. “This is not a coffee-table book; it is the table itself,” noted one reviewer. “One need only add legs.”7

  The book garnered enormous publicity and outsold every book Abrams had ever published. Despite the forty-five-dollar price tag (sixty dollars after Christmas), more than 200,000 copies were in print a year later. “He got two Christmas seasons out of it,” recalled Christopher Finch,8 a British critic who would soon be tapped to write the prefatory essay for yet another Rockwell monograph.

  The publication of the Abrams book made Rockwell’s work newly visible and encouraged an all-new reading of it. Suddenly, although his paintings had never been seen as a realistic view of the American present, they were held up as a realistic view of the past. Critics reviewing the book spoke of it as a social document that captured America before the fall—a world devoid of pollution, drugs, and violent crime. A world composed of decent individuals who convene in barbershops and auto-repair shops and always have time to hear your story.

  In other words, Rockwell portrayed an America rich in “social capital,” to borrow a phrase from political science that refers to the bonds people forge through friendship and shared citizenship. His work offered indelible images of ordinary citizens who felt connected to one another in the decades before the 1960s. Political scientists would later describe the seventies as a time when social ideals gave way to selfish individualism, the Me Decade, as Tom Wolfe pithily put it. Robert D. Putnam elaborated on the phenomenon in his book Bowling Alone, which bemoaned the loss of communitarian ideals and portrayed America as a nation of solitaries. In the seventies, his research found, Americans became less likely to join clubs, vote in national elections, or even invite a friend for dinner.

  It was at this point that Rockwell’s message came to seem so distinct that his name became an adjective. The word Rockwellian first appeared in print in August 1971, when a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, visiting a church picnic in Sharon, Connecticut, commented, “Its pastoral setting could only be described as Norman Rockwellian.” Over time, the word Rockwellian would come to denote a world purged of darkness and evil, life at its most sanitized and G-rated. What’s interesting is how Rockwell, a repressed man who feared dirt and mud, a neat freak who washed his brushes with Ivory soap and polished his shoes on fishing trips, created a vision of human connectedness that dovetailed with the American fantasy of civic togetherness, which similarly required that baser urges (xenophobia, racism, killer competitiveness, etc.) be scrubbed out of the picture.

  * * *

  The PR department at Harry N. Abrams sent Rockwell on what publicists call a “national author tour,” flying him and Molly around the country for more than a month. On the way to Los Angeles, they stopped in Dayton, Ohio, where Rockwell was mortified when a stewardess who noticed him hobbling off the plane offered him a wheelchair. He was exhausted by the tour and contracted a chest cold that he could not shake. But somehow he was able to muster his usual folksy charm for interviewers. When they asked him about the new book, he fake-objected vigorously to the word art in the title, protesting, “I’m an illustrator, not an artist.”9 Asked by The Washington Post what his sons thought of his work, Rockwell replied without missing a beat, “I’ve never asked them. I suppose they’d hold their noses.”

  In New York, he did the talk-show circuit—Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, and David Frost—which required that he stay up later than he appreciated and tolerate the other impositions of live television, “where you have to wait, usually in the cellar surrounded by pipes, until your time comes to go on.”10

  Television interviews, unlike newspaper stories in which a stream of rambling conversation can be edited down into a few choice quotations, betrayed the toll that age had taken on Rockwell. On December 2, when he appeared on The David Frost Show, the recollection of key dates completely eluded him. Medical doctors or discerning viewers might have noticed that he sounded generally disoriented. In fact he was in the early stages of dementia.

  As Frost flipped through Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator and stopped at well-known paintings, hoping to elicit entertaining anecdotes about their genesis, Rockwell struggled for words and at times was able to furnish only non sequiturs.

  David Frost: “What was the origin of Doctor and Doll, this one? It was 1929.”11

  Rockwell: “1929. Well, you see, you can’t in America, you can’t show a priest or a rabbi. So you use a doctor, because they have the respect of the public. I cannot remember who posed for it. I think the little girl is most likely grown and has children.”

  Frost jokes lamely: “1929? We hope she’s grown!”

  The host then asks Rockwell about more dates. “This was 1946,” he says, pointing to a painting in the book.

  “It was?” Rockwell asks. “I don’t know.”

  A moment later, Frost says: “This is 1957, I think, wasn’t it?”

  “Gee, I wouldn’t know. I can’t remember.”

  In reference to The Problem We All Live With, Frost says, “This is what, 1964?”

  Rockwell mumbles, “I wouldn’t know.”

  Frost counters awkwardly, “I think you would.”

  By now anyone could see he was frail. His weight had dropped to 115 pounds, which was alarming for a man who stood five foot eleven and had seemed rail-thin even in his heavier days. “Once I weighed 145 pounds,” he said, “but it all went to my belly.”1
2

  By now it had been twenty-five years since Arthur L. Guptill published his Norman Rockwell: Illustrator, the first-ever monograph on Rockwell. Guptill was no longer alive. But the company he founded, Watson-Guptill Publications, refused to give Harry N. Abrams a monopoly on Rockwell books and reissued its own that fall. The text went only as far as World War II and the illustrations included nothing more recent than the Four Freedoms. But at $14.95, it was one-third the price of the Abrams book and outsold it. For one week, it even appeared on The New York Times bestseller list, right behind The Sensuous Woman, by the author who listed herself as J, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.13

  * * *

  Danenberg planned to follow up his Rockwell exhibition with a second one-man show at the gallery. In the course of a year, several dates were reserved and scratched out in short order. Rockwell kept pushing the show back, as if it were possible to push it into oblivion. “Dear Norman,” Danenberg wrote in January, “I am disappointed that you are once again postponing your exhibition to the fall.”14 He had been hoping that Rockwell would produce a group of paintings that were not magazine illustrations, but that could be marketed as 100 percent art.

  “Obviously it cannot be financial need that compels you to accept additional commissions,” Danenberg continued, in a tone of annoyance that verged on bullying. “If you are at all concerned with securing a permanent place for yourself in the mainstream of American art, you should give serious thought to my suggestion.”

  It was Molly Rockwell who answered Danenberg, in a pointed letter. The 1968 gallery exhibition, the Brobdingnagian Abrams book, the cross-country book tour, the many interviews—they had taken their toll on Rockwell, burdening him with a level of “exposure that has brought the world about his ears. For any man of his age (he will be 77 this week) it would be confusing, and for him, with his particular temperament, it has proved overwhelming and painfully bewildering.”15

  It is artists, not dealers, who are supposed to feel insufficiently appreciated. But Danenberg, irritated by Rockwell’s repeated refusals to have a second show, became unhinged when he heard that Rockwell was contemplating doing a new project with Abrams and allowing the book publisher to issue a portfolio of prints. He tried to turn Rockwell against Abrams, reminding him that the big monograph, with an initial print run of 56,000 copies, had quickly sold out—yet failed to provide the artist with a penny in royalties. “His publication of your book was not an act of charity,” Danenberg noted three months after the book came out.16 “He has probably made half a million on the first edition, and will most likely do better on future editions. How much royalty are you getting?”

  Nothing, actually. As Molly wrote to Danenberg, Rockwell “was so pleased to have it brought it out that he himself declared that he did not want any royalties. Mr. Abrams is in the process of drawing up a legal contract to pay him generously in spite of his renunciation.”17

  Who ever heard of an author or artist who doesn’t want royalties? Rockwell was not exactly a shark when it came to negotiating on his own behalf and Molly’s comment that Rockwell had done the Abrams book without even a contract makes one realize how little stamina he had for business dealings.

  Although Abrams finally drew up a contract, it was not generous, promising a small royalty payment (fifty cents per book, or less than 1 percent of the cover price) on future sales. Never mind the tens of thousands of books that had already sold. The contract also provided for a variety of new projects that were tacked on like so many congressional riders. Perhaps the most frivolous was a “Special Edition” of the monograph, a “numbered leather-bound edition” of one hundred copies, each of which would have to be signed by the artist.18

  Toward the end of the summer, Danenberg once again tried to persuade Rockwell to have a second show at the gallery. Rockwell again declined, testily informing the art dealer that such an exhibition would be deleterious to the pace and progress of his work. “May I repeat that I just want to paint, uninterrupted, more and better pictures.”19

  * * *

  By then Danenberg was dreaming up Rockwell exhibitions on an ever grander scale. In April 1971 he took it upon himself to suggest to the Brooklyn Museum that it join him in co-organizing a Rockwell retrospective that could travel around the country and earn money for both Danenberg and the museum. He did this without Rockwell’s permission. He hoped that he might convince Rockwell to lend the Four Freedoms and a few other of his best paintings to the retrospective, but by now the art dealer owned or knew enough people who owned enough Rockwell paintings to do the show without Rockwell’s participation if he had to. Which, sadly, is exactly what happened.

  On April 22, Danenberg drove his Bentley convertible to the Brooklyn Museum, where he met with Buechner and curator Sarah Faunce. He told them he was “a Brooklyn boy,” a native whose love for the museum was so deep as to be almost tribal. After the meeting, Faunce wrote up the proceedings in a memo, noting that Danenberg proposed to organize a Rockwell exhibition that would open in Brooklyn and then “circulate to several (perhaps as many as ten) museums around the country.” He hoped to benefit financially: he would receive one-third of all ticket sales, and tickets were one dollar apiece.20

  Just a few weeks later, Buechner, who had grown exasperated trying to run a museum amid the shaky finances of Mayor John Lindsay’s New York City, left Brooklyn to take a job upstate, as president of the Corning Museum of Glass. Danenberg wasted no time in writing a letter to the museum’s new director, Duncan Cameron, a hard-nosed Canadian businessman. The new director wrote back: “I am glad to report that we would like to take the exhibition on the terms you state, namely on a non-fee basis with one-third of the admissions receipts returnable to the [Danenberg] Gallery to cover expenses.”21

  At the same time, Cameron wondered about the propriety of the arrangement. Two weeks after officially approving the show, he wrote for advice to his friend Evan Hopkins Turner, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “to raise the question about museum ethics.”22

  Turner answered him immediately. The Brooklyn show, he informed Cameron with admirable frankness, struck him as unethical. He was surprised the museum would allow its premises to be commandeered, even temporarily, by Danenberg. His own museum, the Philadelphia Museum, Turner pointed out, “has a policy that it presents no exhibition that has been done entirely by a commercial dealer. We have the inevitable fear of the vested interest the dealer must have, often to what degree unbeknownst to the institution. Thus, we have a carte blanche rule.”23

  In the end, the Brooklyn Museum went ahead with the show as planned. It was Danenberg who selected the pictures and did basically everything other than write the reviews.

  * * *

  The Brooklyn Museum retrospective should have been the capstone of Rockwell’s professional life. Finally, after a half century as an illustrator, he was being celebrated as an artist whose paintings were fit to appear not only on magazine covers but in a leading American art museum whose holdings went back to the art of ancient Egypt and whose Beaux Arts building, at 200 Eastern Parkway, was of the exalted Greek-temple variety, complete with a colonnade of iconic Ionic columns out front.

  But Rockwell wanted nothing to do with the exhibition. It was almost impossible for him to view it as a meaningful event. It had sprung less from an interest in his work than from the stark pursuit of profit. It had been conceived by a Madison Avenue art dealer interested in raising the value of Rockwell’s paintings by having them gain the imprimatur of the Brooklyn Museum, which, in turn, had taken on the show not to provide visitors with an aesthetic experience but to capitalize on the artist’s popularity, draw throngs to its premises, and relieve its crippling money headaches.

  Which is hardly a crime. But it is unsettling to realize that the museum exhibition was no more rigorous than the ones organized over the years by The Saturday Evening Post, which promoted Rockwell for its own gain. The Post belonged to the world of consumerism, of e
fficient refrigerators and new cars, whereas an art museum is a nonprofit institution that ostensibly extricates itself from the demands of consumerism in order to better arbitrate aesthetic and ethical issues.

  Six weeks before the show opened, Cameron wrote to Rockwell to invite him to the opening reception. “It would mean a great deal to all of us if you could be present on this occasion,” the museum director wrote.24

  “Dear Mr. Cameron,” Rockwell replied tersely on February 8. “My schedule is so crowded it is just out of the question … I am very sorry that I cannot accept the invitation.”25

  Buechner, the former director of the museum, was summoned to do a Rockwell intervention. He personally liked Rockwell and was reluctant to prevail on him for a favor, but did his halfhearted best. “The fact that your schedule is too full to permit your attending the opening at Brooklyn means, to them at the least, that you don’t consider the exhibition very important,” he reminded Rockwell in a letter. “As they have chosen you as the artist to follow last year’s extraordinarily successful exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings lent by the Dutch government, you can imagine their feelings. Please reconsider.”26 Rockwell did reconsider. His decision was to fly to Europe the day the show opened. He and Molly took a week-long vacation, visiting his son Peter in Rome and continuing on to Tunis and Spain.

  Another source of friction was Rockwell’s refusal to lend his best pictures to the show. He declined to share the Four Freedoms. At the last minute, at Buechner’s urging, he did relent on Marriage License and Shuffleton’s Barbershop, both of which were on loan to the Old Corner House. One condition: the paintings could be shown only in Brooklyn and would have to skip the yearlong tour that would be taking the Rockwell retrospective to some ten museums. Just two weeks before the show opened, Rockwell called a taxi and had the two paintings driven down to Brooklyn. “I’ll be glad to send down for them when the exhibition is over,” he pointedly informed Cameron.27