The awakening of Norman Rockwell
Very interesting.
The awakening of Norman Rockwell
For decades, the artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers championed a retrograde view of America. This is the story of the politically turbulent 1960s, a singular painting, and Rockwell’s unlikely change of heart.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/2/19/21052356/norman-rockwell-the-problem-we-all-live-with-saturday-evening-post
By Tom Carson Updated Feb 26, 2020, 9:00am EST
The Highlight by Vox logo
Sometime on Tuesday, November 8, 1960, a 66-year-old widower and self-described “moderate Republican” went to his polling place in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to vote for his state’s junior senator for president. Never the most forthcoming of men, Norman Rockwell hadn’t told his family he was backing John F. Kennedy. He’d painted portraits of both candidates for the Saturday Evening Post, and he just didn’t like Richard Nixon’s face.
It was only a short walk down Main Street from the two-story Colonial house supposedly once occupied by Aaron Burr, whose derelict red barn Rockwell had converted into his fastidiously tidy studio. He’d called Stockbridge home since relocating from rural Vermont six years earlier, mainly for proximity to its renowned Austen Riggs psychiatric center. His second wife, Mary, who struggled with alcoholism and depression, had been a chronic patient there.
In those newly cosmopolitan times — the Mad Men era, for shorthand’s sake — the Anytown, USA, that Rockwell had depicted on hundreds of Post covers was becoming a curio at best and an object of derision at worst. Nixon still espoused a mealy-mouthed fealty to those pseudo-Rockwellian virtues. By choosing Kennedy instead, Rockwell might as well have been casting a ballot to hasten his own obsolescence. But nobody could disagree that he’d had a good run.
Produced in partnership with Epic Magazine.
Born in 1894 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Rockwell had never shown interest in any other career besides commercial illustration. Before his 16th birthday, he had dropped out of high school to enroll at New York’s Art Students League. Untempted by the bohemia of Greenwich Village and seemingly indifferent to (or unnerved by) the concept of a love life, he had business cards printed for himself while he was still in his teens.
Most midcentury Americans would have had trouble fathoming the idea that Norman Rockwell had ever been that young or unknown. In the four and a half decades since his Post debut in 1916, his humorous vignettes of awkward situations and glowing ones of social and domestic rituals had defined the nation’s most idyllic self-image. From Andy Hardy movies to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Hollywood’s version of homey American verities was by and large a facsimile of Rockwell’s.
But by the time he cast that vote in 1960, his perspective was growing increasingly remote from the bulk of his fellow citizens’ lived experience in cities and postwar suburbs. The concept of kitsch had begun following Rockwell around in print like one of the lovelorn puppies he would include in a painting whenever he was at a loss for an effect (a habit that he would later mock).
Worse, the Saturday Evening Post wasn’t the national arbiter it had been. A few months after JFK’s inaugural, the magazine would promise jittery advertisers a drastically modernized look under a new editor-in-chief who promptly recanted the Post’s endorsement of Nixon the previous fall. The demotion of Rockwell’s Main Street America to the Rat Pack’s Nowheresville wasn’t explicit, but everybody got the gist.
Norman Rockwell and Mary Barstow, just before their marriage in 1930. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
It’s unlikely he even considered retiring. At ease only when at his easel, he took little interest in hobbies — or even in his family. Not the most well-rounded of men, Rockwell, when asked to describe his leisure activities by Edward R. Murrow on CBS’s Person to Person in 1959, responded that he couldn’t think of any, except the “countless hours” he spent tearing up diaper cloths for use as paint rags...........................................................
= new reply since forum marked as read
