Norman Rockwell (39 page)

Commonly considered little more than a stock-in-trade signature, similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie cameos, Rockwell’s appearances on many of his covers attest, according to Peter Rockwell—a sculptor and art historian—to the deep interest his father took in theoretical questions about truth in realistic art. Rockwell’s speculations about art and reality are manifested in several ways throughout his career: in the early thirties, for instance, he had created a cover with the billboard artist facing his project, the audience privy only to his back; but one oversized, boldly flirtatious eye stares challengingly at us from the billboard. Other times, philosophical challenges are implied through his paintings-about-paintings, covers that allow the picture itself to react to the viewers who are claiming their right to judge; occasionally, he combined his famous April Fools’ Day cover (replete with forty to sixty logical incongruities) with the painting that speaks from its frame, such as the April 3, 1943,
Post
cover. Even Rockwell’s particular use of the age-old conceit of the self-portrait emphasizes the slippery nature of truth in art, slyly reminding others that his paintings are not the imitations of life they often believe them to be.

Rockwell’s intellectual sophistication jousted with his need to please his audience, and the only way he played out such academic questions about reality versus representation was indirectly, toying with the viewers in a highly private way, asserting his own authority as artist outside of the solidarity with the mythic “Average American” in which his popularity was grounded. Rockwell had, by this point, firmly established an unsettling way of appearing to side with the crowd, while in effect holding himself aloof, above them. Critic Arthur Danto, who admires Rockwell’s “intelligence,” feels that “there is something I have not been able to put into words about his depiction of people. He seemed at once sympathetic to them and superior to them. He does not take them seriously, and the joke is almost always at their expense, as he causes the viewer to feel superior.” Paradoxically, Rockwell inserts himself into the paintings to allow himself to stand back from the implied viewers, to feel superior to them as well.

Every artist has a psychological strategy underlying his imagination, however accessibly or not it appears. Rockwell’s layers-of-seeing becomes an overt subject in many of his paintings, such as
Fireman
(1945),
The Art Critic
(1954), and
Triple Self-Portrait
(1961). But it’s already present in a less thematic way earlier, in scenes meant to be viewed sympathetically—fixed objects of the audience’s knowing gaze. Behind the sentimental exchange lurks a sense of the puppeteer, never out of control. “He robs the subject of a certain dignity in order to make the viewer feel better about himself,” the otherwise admiring Danto complains. It was similar to the way that his mother had used her weak younger son to sustain her own fragile self-importance.

The three paintings that followed the first one were also
Post
covers:
Freedom to Worship
appeared on February 27, 1942,
Freedom from Want
on March 6, and
Freedom from Fear
on March 13. The last two paintings disappointed Rockwell, at least in retrospect, because he felt they came off as smug, especially to Europeans lacking the comfort of distance from the battlegrounds that Americans at home enjoyed.
Freedom from Want,
a Thanksgiving table set with minimal food in comparison with the typical American feast day, nonetheless flaunts in the face of the less fortunate, Rockwell came to believe, the overabundance of turkey, celery, fruit, and Jell-O.
Freedom from Fear
errs by allowing American viewers to sigh in relief that they can tuck their children into bed safely each night, in sharp contrast to the victims of the bombings alluded to in the newspaper the father holds.

But the second painting,
Freedom
to Worship
,
which took Rockwell two months to complete, pleased him immensely. He fully worked up his preliminary idea in a detailed oil painting on canvas, forty-one by thirty-three inches. Because to Rockwell tolerance was the basis for a democracy’s religious diversity, he decided to show a Jewish man being shaved by a New England Protestant barber, while a black man and a Roman Catholic priest waited their turns. He found himself unable to characterize the men not in clerical garb without resorting to offensive stereotypes—exaggerating the Jewish man’s Semitic features, squaring the white customer into a preppy golfer, and rendering the black man as an agrarian. The composition is clean, impressively sparse, in counterpoise to a dense narrative content. Beautifully painted even at the preliminary oil sketch stage, the picture would have failed to convey clearly the government’s theme, even if it had exemplified Rockwell’s own spirituality.

When he devised his new scheme, he still found ways to suggest the diversity of the population, but more subtly, through visual clues among a unified mass of heads. One man holds the Koran, one woman a rosary, while the man in the middle of the painting exhibits a Roman nose, in clear but understated contrast to the rest of the worshippers. Two very-dark-skinned black congregants frame the painting diagonally, a woman at the top left, a man at the bottom right. The
Post
had not yet made a practice of moving blacks into prominent visual positions, and Rockwell later explained that he bucked the Curtis system by “furtively” painting the face of the black woman at the top; the man at the bottom, with his fez, was too obviously foreign to offend. Across the top of the canvas the aphorism “Each according to the dictates of his own conscience” is lettered in gold, a platitude that suggests the plurality of Rockwell’s own thoughts on religion: its likely source was a phrase included in the “Thirteen Articles of Faith” by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly known as the Mormons). Rockwell spent almost two full months on the
Freedom to Worship
theme, worried that religion “is an extremely delicate subject. It is so easy to hurt so many people’s feelings.”

Unfortunately, the tight amalgam of faces—individually exqui-sitely rendered but en masse saturated with piety—and even the crepey skin on the elderly hands, which have become the objects of worship, push the theme over the edge from idealistic tolerance into gooey sentiment, where human difference seems caught up in a magical moment of dispensation from the Light. The restraint demanded by art that deals with heightened emotion is lacking.

To their detractors, the Four Freedoms try to carry too much weight on their shoulders. The idea of illustrating grandiose concepts with humble correlatives is a sound one; but the executions of Rockwell’s scenes announce their own ambition too loudly to work on that premise. Rockwell was forthright about wanting these paintings to be his masterpieces, his “Big Idea” pictures, as he put it. Inevitably, he was unsatisfied, though he believed himself to have articulated in
Freedom of Speech
the nobility of certain abstract principles that he valued deeply. Paradoxically, had Rockwell not struggled so hard to be worthy, if he had stripped down his portrayals to the kind of quiet small scenes he would do in the fifties, the series might have been the big pictures he desperately wanted to produce.

Still, most viewers felt in 1942 like the twenty-first-century
New York Times
critic who admires Rockwell’s mastery: “I’m not interested in the intentions of artists. . . . I’m interested in consequences.” And, while some people thought that Rockwell’s paintings conveyed a slightly patronizing take on his subjects, the majority of his audience saw it otherwise; as
The New Yorker
would remark two years after the publication of the Four Freedoms: “They were received by the public with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than any other paintings in the history of American art.”

Viewed in the best light, the paintings prove an example of the sum exceeding its parts, the total effect of four domestic paintings about such lofty ideals inspirational in their combined heft alone. The Four Freedoms did, in fact, forward the aims that Roosevelt had set forth and accomplished the work that the best illustrated fairy tales attempt, turning abstractions into forms that exorcise demons. In any event, the United States Treasury quickly surmised their profitability, harnessing the original oils to a tour, cosponsored with
The Saturday Evening Post,
of sixteen cities, seen by 1,222,000 people, and raising $133 million in war bonds for the Treasury. The
Freedom of Speech
painting illustrated the commemorative covers for war bonds and stamps sold during the show. The exhibition’s significance even motivated board members at Rockefeller Center to make extensive alterations to the International Building in order to properly house the exhibition.

Rockwell was pleased at the public’s reception to the paintings, and at least as happy that his art had filled the coffers of a cause he supported. He did not, however, become heavily involved with the exhibition, instead mostly limiting his appearances on its behalf to those locations where he needed to travel in order to undertake new assignments. As usual, he barely paused to take in the present; he was already thinking ahead to what he could do in the wake of his latest success.

22

Square Dancing on the Village Green

During the fall of 1942, when Rockwell was bearing down on the Four Freedoms, Mary was worriedly calculating whether to accept an offer on their New Rochelle house or to renew the renters’ lease instead. A prospective buyer had shown up, and it would be good to get out of paying on two mortgages; but she had little chance to consult with her husband on their financial matters, though the letters from the realtors became more pressing when she failed to respond in a timely fashion. Worse still, the Internal Revenue office had written of an impending audit. Correspondence from the Rockwells’ accountant reveals Mary frantically trying to find old records and checkbooks that she’d not kept track of in their move—the period the government was going to audit. In spite of her husband’s intermittent suggestions that they hire someone to take over at least the business finances, Mary had insisted that she could handle the monetary interests of both family and career. Now, tactfully, the accountant wrote the Internal Revenue of Mrs. Rockwell’s less-than-thorough bookkeeping, advising the office that the Rockwells would nonetheless do everything possible to comply.

Photographs of Mary Rockwell from this period show her beginning to exhibit signs of stress. Circles under her eyes have become a permanent fixture, and, though ever mindful of her figure, she has begun to put on weight. An interview in
Good Housekeeping
describes her as wearing glasses regularly, which she explains she used to avoid when she could for the sake of appearances; now she thinks such vanity silly. Possibly a positive sign of independence, it seems just as likely that Mary’s flouting of old standards for her appearance stemmed from her inability to spend time on what now seems frivolous. Her sons are eleven, nine, and six years old, and her aging mother-in-law is still living nearby; her husband depends on her daily feedback and discussion, and expects her to answer his voluminous fan mail, collect props, and deliver his paintings, and she often has to take the train to New York or Philadelphia—all in addition to handling the finances. At least the Rockwells hired a couple to work part-time for them: Mrs. Wheaton as the cook, Mr. Wheaton as a handyman.

Rockwell’s income was certainly high compared to that of most Americans, but he and Mary lived somewhat carelessly, making travel and household decisions impulsively in ways that caused them to pay premium prices where more cautious and timely buying would have cut their costs dramatically. Now they decided that it was foolish not to spend some of Rockwell’s earnings on hiring more outside help, since Mary was overburdened and Rockwell always behind. Again this year, at Christmastime, the couple found themselves unable to pay off a bank note for $1,500, electing instead to ask the bank to roll it into a larger loan for $2,500, tiding them over until the payments they expected at the beginning of 1943 arrived. Reprieved until January 10, when the entire note would come due, the Rockwells paused to notice that their year’s income had dropped to around $37,400, largely because of less income from ads, as Rockwell had cut back on these in favor of the Four Freedoms. Neither the Sunday dinners, with the uncompromisingly fine roast and vegetables, nor the yearly trip to the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden, Rockwell’s treat to his sons, was threatened by the slight decline in their finances. Still, as 1943 opened, Mary Rockwell was stretched thin from solving one problem after another, with very little intervention from her husband. Even positive events required energy she felt short of: the household was turned upside down when the painter was honored in Washington by Under Secretary of the Treasury Daniel Bell, who presented Rockwell with the Distinguished Service Award for lending his talents so bountifully to the war cause. At least by late spring, Mary felt relief from the improvement of the family’s finances, when the
Post
check for $10,000 arrived, payment in full for the Four Freedoms.

By mid-May, the harried woman had more than the usual reasons to feel pulled from all sides: the boys were home from school with the measles. At least they were going through it at the same time, and she only had to come up with one set of diversions for her bored sons. About a week into their quarantine, the Rockwells’ middle son, Tommy, sleeping restlessly either from the illness or because he’d napped so much throughout the day, groggily wandered into the bathroom around one
A.M.,
when a desultory glance outside the window confused him; he thought he saw orange flames leaping out of his father’s studio next door. He woke his parents, and Rockwell, finding the phone out of order, drove to the next house, a half mile away, to call for help. By the time the fire department arrived, the entire studio had burned to the ground. Rockwell’s career-long collection of authentic period costumes, his extensive reference library, thirty original oils, all his materials, were gone. Neighbors gathered throughout the ordinarily dark early morning hours, sitting on the hillside with doughnuts and coffee Mary provided, comforting the artist and watching the smoldering ashes. Rockwell took the public and private attitude—which, as Mary later noted, had worried her—that the calamity was not so hard to manage after all.

Fortunately, the last of the Four Freedoms had been shipped off only a few months earlier, and from comments Rockwell made, it is possible that the paintings, all published by now, had been stored in the studio until a few days earlier. Perhaps the near catastrophe of losing them made it easier for him to conduct himself stoically now, behavior that won respect from the Vermonters. He announced to his family the next day that since they were all tired of being so isolated anyway, they would find another house in town, rather than rebuild the studio.

News of Rockwell’s studio fire was published nationally; Rockwell himself publicized the event by, naturally, working it out in his art. Copying closely the model his cousin Mary Amy Orpen had developed of sketching tiny cartoons on one page to illustrate a series of events, he created a page of whimsy, making it sound as if the barn burning was but another great adventure in the life of a country artist. The real cost to him went unexpressed, though Mary Rockwell, even at the time, believed her husband’s lack of dealing with his loss would come back to haunt him. As soon as the nation’s illustrators learned of the catastrophe, they banded together to replace much of what he had lost. Fans began sending him costume pieces, which he stored in the garage until even that overflowed.

In the meantime, he and Mary had located a large, clapboard farmhouse three miles down the valley in West Arlington. Situated across from the village green where they square-danced on Friday nights, the 1754 residence sat fifty feet from its twin building, occupied by a well-respected local dairy farmer and his family, the Edgertons. Rockwell signed the mortgage within days, and began arranging for an old red barn out back to be converted into his new studio. Until it was completed, he worked in Schaef’s space, much smaller than what he was used to. And within a few years, he had a small cottage built in the woods about a mile from the house, so that he or Mary could escape the increasingly oppressive sense of being a tourist site, especially in the summers.

The Rockwells would come to feel that the biggest blessing derived from the fire was the friends they gained next door. Jim and Clara Edgerton barely managed to support their four children through nonstop work on their small dairy farm, but their sense of fun, their dignity, and their tolerance of others resulted in the two families, as different as they were, becoming fast friends. In later years, when Rockwell was interviewed about the Edgertons, he explained: “Farming is a hard life in Vermont,” due to the short growing season, lack of flat land, and the rocky fields. He liked Jim and Clara, because “hard life and misfortune haven’t soured [them]. . . . I don’t think they know how to be mean-spirited or nasty.”

Rockwell liked people in general, enjoying their idiosyncrasies, indulging their weaknesses, as long as they weren’t self-important or patronizing. A man like Jim Edgerton would have earned his deepest loyalty. The enviably handsome man was known for his gentle disposition and generosity. Always one to cosign for others’ loans even though he barely had enough money for his own family, he was too proud, his son Buddy believes, to borrow money from anyone in his life except for Rockwell, and Buddy believes it a measure of the artist’s character that his father felt able to do so. Somehow, a relationship developed between Jim and Norman that allowed the farmer to freely borrow money until the milk checks arrived, when he’d promptly repay the loan. Buddy believes that Rockwell’s enormous tactfulness eased such matters. “One time, I know Norman wanted to paint their farmhouse. But my dad didn’t have enough money yet to do ours, and Norman didn’t want to make him look bad. So he just waited till we could both paint the twin farmhouses at the same time.”

Clara Edgerton ran errands for Rockwell, becoming, after Mary, the person he entrusted most often with delivering his ad work to New York and his covers to Philadelphia, when there was no time to mail them. Joy Edgerton helped Mary with kitchen work and assisted her when she entertained out-of-town guests for dinners; the other two children baby-sat for Peter. Most of all, Buddy Edgerton hunted and fished and played ball with Tommy, even buying fishhooks with the money he earned from modeling for Rockwell.

“I believe that Tommy kind of relied on my household for the normal things a boy often does with his father,” Buddy says. “His own father was always working and didn’t have the time to teach him to drive, like my father did, or go fishing. Sometimes it seemed as if Tommy lived at our house, and I loved it. He and I were close friends, even though I was a few years older.” What the Vermont neighbors thought of the frequent columns lauding Rockwell’s parental involvement, such as
The Boston Globe
’s May 30 spread that year, showing the artist “giving his son a baseball lesson: the artist will let a painting wait almost any time,” while he shows his son how to hold a bat, was never recorded. Certainly such public mythologizing confused at least the Rockwells’ oldest son, whom the Arlington community always thought of as “different,” Buddy recalls—“Jerry was more of a loner or outsider.” Jerry—Jarvis—Rockwell recalls his acute discomfort at feeling his family actually lived on the covers of
Saturday Evening Post
s, rather than in reality.

And, while Rockwell’s sons agree that the Edgertons played a special role in their lives, Jarvis also believes that the relationship was necessarily compromised by the huge divide between the wildly successful New York illustrator and his life, on the one hand, and the native Vermont farmers, on the other. “That difference between us, that we all, especially my father, tried to pretend wasn’t there, created a subliminal tension,” Rockwell’s oldest son asserts. “People enjoy talking about how close everyone was to each other, how we fit in, and that’s not exactly true. I was well aware that the townspeople realized that my father was making a lot of money off capitalizing on their way of life, on semi-becoming one of them. There was no bad faith on anyone’s side, it was just the reality. What could you do about it? But it was like the elephant in the living room that everyone pretends isn’t there and steps around.”

Hints of such tension surface in Buddy’s still envy-tinged reminiscence of the flagrant ill-treatment of expensive toys he witnessed next door. “The boys would own these incredible new bikes that I’d never even seen before, and they just left them outside. Once Tommy was given a very expensive .22 for Christmas, one I would have given anything for. And he left it outside and let it rust. I told him I couldn’t believe it.” Group snapshots of the Edgertons with Rockwell convey a sense of the painter’s slight awkwardness, especially in contrast to pictures of him socializing with his illustrator friends and their families.

Rockwell’s professional success was never as wonderfully entwined with his personal life as during the mid-1940s. His tight community of illustrator friends fed his energies—intellectual, technical, social. During this year, Jack Atherton won fourth place in the “Artists for Victory” show, his painting
The Black Horse
receiving the $3,000 prize out of more than fourteen thousand entries. The Metropolitan Museum took the painting into its permanent collection; if the event stung a little, Rockwell also clearly received validation from working with and being friends with Atherton. When Rockwell could take the time off from his own work, Mead Schaeffer, the third of the regular trio, took his neighbor and colleague along with him for company on many of the tours of military facilities he conducted to paint his fourteen covers of combat forces. Bumping along on a dusty road in a jeep and examining the tanks appealed enormously to Rockwell. Such jaunts combined his desire to socialize with people who spoke his language with the practical need to soak up wartime atmosphere.

Accompanying Schaef to the Army bases helped produce two of Rockwell’s best World War II pieces, the poster
Give Him Enough and On Time
and the
Post
cover
Rosie the Riveter,
published on May 29, 1943. The massive migration of women during the war into jobs previously held by men was nationally touted as patriotism at work. A year earlier, a popular song of this name made the rounds, as the sight of women in overalls and carrying industrial tools became routine. Rockwell’s particular contribution to the image was to combine so many significant iconic references into one portrait of a woman. Oversized, strong, and well-muscled, her powerful riveting gun lying provocatively across her heavy blue jeans, Rosie seems to be the Statue of Liberty come alive. Modeled obviously from Michelangelo’s Prophet Isaiah, the painting’s reference was immediately caught by
Post
readers, a few of whom questioned the propriety of appropriating Michelangelo. Rosie acquires additional moral weight through the placement of her foot on top of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf,
while the ham sandwich she holds domesticates her out of self-righteous monumentalism. Her red curly hair and upturned nose feminize her, even as her ruddy complexion keeps the portrait from becoming a patronizing twist on gender. This woman manages to be prepossessing, powerful, extraordinarily competent—and womanly, too. As another noted
Post
illustrator of the time, Pete Helck, wrote Rockwell in admiration, he had meant to write a condolence letter about the fire, but having just seen Rosie, “I could no longer procrastinate. I think it’s a beauty, and full of dignity in spite of its grand humor. And, Rosie’s right arm is a piece of painting that positively thrills me. Rosie’s swell bulk and design make her a contemporary Sibylle.”