Norman Rockwell (47 page)

He wrote to Rockwell to inform him that they’d made a few changes in his recently submitted oil,
Before the Date,
because
Post
audiences weren’t as sophisticated as professionally trained artists and would be confused by the formal perspective Rockwell had employed. The staff had agreed that the two young people preening for their date, a girl and a young cowboy, would appear to be dressing in the same bedroom. Reluctantly, Rockwell accepted the critique and the art director’s adjustments. But when the picture was published, the artist saw that Stuart had actually painted out the figure of a horse Rockwell had placed within the window view of the cowboy. His shock reverberates in the letter he shot back to the
Post.

Distraught, he told both Ken Stuart and Ben Hibbs that things had gone too far. For an artist to find his work altered without his permission, to have someone else “paint it” and use his name, was unethical, even stretching as far as he could. If this was now the policy of the
Post,
Rockwell could work for them no longer.

He was serious, that much is clear. And over the next six months, Hibbs treated him delicately, wooing him back to happiness. Ken Stuart had provoked a showdown that he lost. Once Rockwell realized that he took priority over Stuart with Hibbs, he began extending himself to befriend the conquered art editor. As he later told Mary, he had won, and from now on, they should all just be friendly. The best work would get done that way.

Clearly, however, both personal and professional pressures were affecting Rockwell’s work. During the late fall, he began his sketches for
The Facts of Life,
a relatively straightforward painting of a middle-aged father sitting down to explain the birds and the bees to his adolescent son, the painting deliberately suggesting that the two parties are equally terrified. He would spend a year and a half on the minor painting, completing one oil rendering only to decide the room was wrong. After finishing the next version, set in the living room instead of the bedroom, he realized he’d used the wrong father figure. On and on the changes went, making the painting his most fraught, at least for his youngest son, Peter, who posed for the child in one of the cover’s incarnations. Now convinced that his father’s own discomfort with sexual frankness and his concern about adequately fathering his own sons were the grist of the supposedly artistic difficulties, Peter remembers the bizarre determination to get it right in this painting that plagued his father for eighteen months.

In light of the typical father-son connections of the period, and given Rockwell’s own coming-of-age as he watched his uncle die of syphilis from “being with too many women,” the tension seems understandable. But Rockwell’s obsessiveness over this particular subject literally cost him greatly, because he spent so much time on the one picture that he had to take out loans to cover his lack of income.

And in the meantime, Rockwell’s family scene was breaking down around him. By 1950, Mary was beginning to reach out to friends in the community to regain her mental stability. Clara Edgerton, her next-door neighbor, was, by now, taking commissions to New York and even transporting
Post
covers to Philadelphia when Mary was feeling bad. Soon, the kindly woman started accompanying Mary daily on long walks, allowing her to sound off about her depression. At night, when Mary couldn’t get to sleep, she began calling Toby Schaeffer to talk, keeping Mead’s wife up till two or three
A.M.
with her long discussions of what she could do to reinvent herself and to flesh out her own talents. “My mother had always been a partner with my father,” Leah Schaeffer recalls. “She was his photographer, and they had this teamship that I didn’t feel Mary and Norman did. Maybe that’s because my father didn’t work nearly the hours Norman did either, or take his work so seriously. Sometimes Schaef would say, for God’s sake, Norman, the painting is finished. Just stop! And Norman would say he just had to do one more thing to it. He said he wanted to please his audience, and my dad said why? And when he said he wanted to be a household name, my father and Jack Atherton would yell at him, and they’d all really get into it. So Mary had to live with that kind of ambition and perfectionism, and she liked talking to my mother about it.”

Mary had found no release in the world outside herself; instead, her Arlington friends such as Joy Edgerton remember her searching for “something” in nearby Episcopal and Catholic churches. She joined a writers’ group, and though the stories and poems she proudly shared with her sister show signs of literary intelligence, their clumsiness and cliché in no way bode well for her aspirations to send them eventually to
The New Yorker
or
The Atlantic Monthly.
Her life kept unraveling, instead of improving: during this next year, according to her sons, she had two car accidents, apparently related to her drinking. She would later have her driver’s license revoked by the Massachusetts police; since she still lived in Vermont, her driving to Riggs must have been the occasion of their action.

During the first few months of 1950, among some of the most trying personal times Rockwell had faced since the humiliation dealt him by his first schoolteacher wife, he painted what many consider his masterpiece,
Shuffleton’s Barbershop,
appearing as the
Post
cover on April 29, 1950. His art historian son explains that his father loved finding new challenges, and now he had taken on the problem of painting a small group of men playing musical instruments in an illuminated inner cubicle at the back of a large darkened room, all seen through a plate-glass window. Finally, he had created a powerful painting, whose impact lies in the details that overwhelm in exactly the right way, in their potency. The final moment in which Rockwell compulsively adds the overkill to most of his paintings, pushing the portrait into caricature partly to avoid being judged as a serious artist, never occurred in this painting. It’s as if Mary actually spirited the piece away from him, as she threatened to do so many times when he was overworking a painting.

John Updike once observed that
Shuffleton’s Barbershop
“yields nothing in skill and reflective interplay to a Richard Estes. It differs from an Estes in the coziness of the details Rockwell has chosen to illuminate . . . [but] this is amazing painting.” The painterly achievement in such prosaic moments as the stepboard on the barber’s chair, its metal grillwork articulated but in shadow, capture the viewer’s attention as much as the scene-within-a-scene. And the small black cat that sits quietly near the front of the outer room, observing the elderly men in the distance as they practice their instruments after closing time, controls the viewer’s experience perfectly, refusing any tendency for the onlooker to feel superior as the outsider who sees without being seen. The cat, lacking the careful articulation of the rest of the painting, also contrasts in its plebeian status to the potentially arty treatment through the left side of the plate glass, where the background is rendered
en grisaille,
a method of working up a scene in shades of gray and tan often used to imply distance.

Shuffleton’s
owes a particular debt to the qualities Rockwell explained many years later most impressed him in Vermeer: his “eye for meticulously rendered, palpable surface detail,” which appealed to him as a like painter of “practical temperament.” Even Vermeer’s faults—his temptation (though usually controlled) to overload his canvas with details—could be Rockwell’s own. And Vermeer also employed photography as an aid, as the supplement that Rockwell always claimed it to be. Although historians waffle on Vermeer’s use of a camera obscura, convincing evidence suggests that he used the device to perfect his perspective and to help him capture light more precisely. Like Rockwell, he was an inveterate reviser, a perfectionist. Unlike Rockwell, however, he worked at a leisurely pace, producing two or three paintings a year to other Dutch artists’ norm of forty or fifty.

Genre painting in general seemed to sharp-eyed and knowledgeable viewers in the mid-fifties to underlie the illustrator’s own work: a prominent New York collector explained that he had begun collecting Rockwells because the painter was “20th century genre painting. I don’t know anyone else who’s specialized in American genre. Maybe photography killed it off, but, in my estimation, when posterity looks back on the art of the 20th century, Norman Rockwell will occupy a singular place.”

That any collector retained the independence in 1950 to value Rockwell or genre painting in general is impressive, in light of the large-scale conversion of American art to the principles that had been decreed in 1939 by the modernist art critic Clement Greenberg. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg’s watershed essay, laid down the laws of good art for decades to come, and such art definitely excluded picture painting. Greenberg’s thesis depended on the subordination of illusion and storytelling to an emphasis on the process as the end product. Painting that called attention to itself became the coin of the realm, the graphic arts counterpart to a tenet of literary modernism by now decades old. This philosophy, transferred to the visual arts, took hold with painters quickly, but the educated and upper-class audiences and buyers of fine art required more time before letting go of the familiar. By 1950, however, as Tom Wolfe has remarked, even those who fashionably held to the lack of distinction between fine art and illustration preached that the purpose of art was “to present, not to represent,” a dictum that usually elevated geometric shapes and abstract modes.

If we believe the later pronouncements of his psychoanalyst, the redoubtable Erik Erikson, Rockwell’s brilliance with
Shuffleton’s Barbershop,
and the flowering of his realistic work of the fifties, flowed freely out of his unhappiness, not from any respite in the drama of his home life. According to Erikson, Rockwell painted his happiness, as he put it, rather than living it. In early 1950, he was deeply worried, yet he had the advantage of Mary’s physical proximity, intermittently and, he assumed, permanently. And Jarvis, reassuringly, was next door in his twin studio. Rockwell was anxious yet secure, worried but motivated.

Larger cultural changes threatened his landscape as well: the challenge to illustration that had hummed under the surface since the war’s end, from the rise of television to the prominence of color photography, was gaining momentum. Rockwell couldn’t know yet that the 1940s had been the last major decade for the illustrator, but his ear was too keenly tuned to his society’s beat not to register the signs all around him. Most ominously, the
Post
Christmas covers had gone to George Hughes and to Constantin Alajalov, an illustrator of the stylish cartoon more typical of
The New Yorker
than the
Post.
An age of consumerism had begun in the prosperity following the war, and a new cover ethos that reflected suburban emphasis on the modern good life was aging Rockwell’s storytelling quickly. If he could give up the onus of reinventing the Golden Age of Illustration, he could just let himself paint.

By the end of the 1940s, an emergent aesthetic in illustration showed that Modernism had finally had a serious impact on this mostly commercial art form. Instead of the strict adherence to narrative realism, new schools of talented illustrators, as Steven Heller points out, included artists who had assimilated the lessons of abstraction, such as Robert Osborn, Robert Weaver, Robert Andrew Parker, Tom Allen, and Phil Hayes, all of whom were more influenced by the paintings of Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning than the traditional forces behind Rockwell’s work. But Rockwell painted his happiness by relying on the lessons of mastery he had spent decades perfecting, and now, when he was experiencing severe personal anguish, he had no desire to change course. Just as Robert Frost derived “a certain strength and stability from reliance on form,” writing to
The Amherst Student
that “anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way,” so did Rockwell lean on his similar aesthetic sensibility. Even if Rockwell had the ability to switch gears at this stage in his career—which he might have—he pursued the opposite tack: perfection of his form. From
Shuffleton’s Barbershop
and
Solitaire,
both painted in 1950, onward, the decade would see him produce painting after painting, each of which staked a claim for inclusion in histories of American realism.

Tellingly, however, the write-ups that the
Post
provided on their artists continued to explicate Rockwell’s painting as cloyingly old-fashioned, even empty-headed stories of an Arcadia populated by a few real people whom the artist personally knew. “In this delightful setting [a local barbershop], Norman Rockwell is relieved periodically of surplus hair. Beyond the charming still life, in the room where life is less still, sits barber—and cello player—Rob Shuffleton, making music with friends.” The vignette identifies the models and speaks of “bygone days” and how little has changed in this part of Vermont. The artistic virtuosity, and the bittersweet aura of time and humility that hangs over the painting, not only go unremarked, they are trampled to death in the onrush of saccharine praise.

25

Putting One Foot in Front of the Other

Throughout their parents’ troubles, and even in the face of Rockwell’s absolute commitment to his art above all else, the Rockwell sons never doubted their father’s loyalty to their mother. Nor did they question the genuine difficulty Mary Rockwell confronted as she tried to get well. Most of all, the boys felt confused, because so little was explained. Tom Rockwell’s best friend, Buddy Edgerton, saw him “swallowing Maalox all the time.” Rockwell became adamant about the older boys staying close to home while their mother was so sad, and Dick Rockwell, their cousin, remembers his own impression from visiting at the time that Mary was deeply upset at the idea that her boys were growing up and going to move away. “I felt so bad for her,” he recalls, tearing up as he speaks. “She was always incredibly good to me, one of the only people in my life to send me letters and packages overseas when I was in the service. Now, when I saw her, one of her eyes seemed to roll around oddly, and I thought she was really going downhill.” Mostly as further inducement for Jerry to stay at home, Rockwell decided to create a summer artists’ colony that year, and he requested that the Art Students League send him their best students for an internship in Vermont.

When the League director approached twenty-four-year-old Don Spaulding, he jumped at the chance. Spending four months in Arlington studying with an illustrator he considered a master was an experience that fundamentally altered his approach to illustration, enabling him to become the successful cartoonist of
Lone Ranger
and
Buck Jones.
Four other Leaguers came with him: Don Winslow, Robert Hogue, Jim Gaboda, and Harold Stevenson. William McBride, an extremely talented young artist who had talked to Rockwell after a lecture the illustrator gave at the University of Vermont, also joined the group; when
Photography
magazine did a feature on McBride as “Germany’s leading American photo-illustrator,” the photographer granted the majority of his accolades to Rockwell.

The six art students lived and worked in the one-room schoolhouse on the West Arlington village green that Rockwell himself had used as a temporary room in which to paint after the fire in 1943, until construction on his new studio up on the hill next to the family’s new house was finished. At the back of the room, kitchen and dormitory-style living quarters were built on to a platform that had once served as the stage for the schoolhouse. Rockwell, who never exhibited his own work in the house or his studio, hung several of his paintings and two by Mead Schaeffer on the walls.

In the months that Spaulding observed Rockwell up close, he saw little to unsettle his hero worship. The only criticism he would level at the illustrator was the complete lack of household responsibility that accompanied Rockwell’s exhaustive work schedule: “He never had to do a thing. I fixed a door once; I doubt he even knew how. Whenever something went wrong in the household, he said that was Mary’s responsibility.” Rockwell’s attitude toward the need for absolute focus on work extended to his sometimes annoying praise for Will McBride, “fixated on his work,” who, somewhat to the other students’ disgust, got away without doing the dishes, because Rockwell “thought he was a genius, not like the rest of us, whom I sneakingly thought disappointed him,” Spaulding recalls.

Just as Charles Hawthorne had done in Provincetown years before, Rockwell adopted a low-key, casual method of instruction. He issued informal assignments and arranged for models to pose for the students. He might saunter in during the day to comment on their work, or he would invite the students into his studio later to respond to his painting in progress. Rockwell encouraged Mead Schaeffer, Jack Atherton, and George Hughes to talk with them. According to Spaulding, Rockwell enjoyed sitting around and “talking about bringing back the Golden Age of Illustration—all the time, he talked about bringing it back, and how Howard Pyle was his hero.”

Most inspiring to the students, Don Spaulding remembers, was watching Rockwell at work. He shared aloud with them all of the stages he went through—planning, photography, sketching, and painting—and his methodical techniques unraveled before their eyes. “Watching him paint was like being reborn,” Spaulding said quietly, still awestruck at the memory more than twenty-five years later. “It looked so easy. . . . I couldn’t wait to get back to the easel, but the next time I’d work, I couldn’t accomplish what he did, no matter how much I applied myself. He simply came onto this earth a genius.” Rockwell emphasized to the students the importance of discipline and hard work; at times, he explained, he’d deliberately simplify his technique, choosing a one-point perspective, perhaps; but on other occasions, he would resolve a problem by figuring out a more complex treatment, such as the challenge of reflecting light through three different barriers. But always Rockwell was excited about the new painting, hoping that this one would be the masterpiece.

The students’ presence clearly inspired Rockwell to perform well. Not only did their praise gratify him, but, just as in Los Angeles the previous year, he deeply enjoyed becoming part of the tradition of great illustrators who taught. His hero Howard Pyle was as famous for the students he molded in his Wilmington and Chadds Ford school and studios—the “Brandywine group”—as for his own work. And George Bridgman had carried on the tradition of taking seriously the passing on of his master’s gifts, a kind of painterly laying-on of hands. Now Rockwell could position himself within such a tradition, by creating an Arlington school.

The piece he did during the students’ early tenure,
Solitaire,
published on the August 19, 1950,
Post
cover, remains one of his most undervalued works. The picture shows a traveling salesman tucked into his motel room bed, a suitcase stacked on his lap to hold his cards. Loneliness and ingenuity both come to life in the formally exact picture, the potential air of Willie Loman–like tragedy marred only by the omnipresent domesticating details—the extra photograph on the wall, the towels neatly hung in clear view.

Although most of the students left at the end of the summer, Don Spaulding stayed into the late fall, while Don Winslow continued to live in the schoolhouse for several more years. Winslow acted as Rockwell’s apprentice for a while, tracing the drawings onto the canvas and painting in an occasional background that required tedious application. Since Rockwell was as warm and funny as Spaulding had been led to believe, he was startled to find the illustrator bonding with the oddball in their group, the manic-depressive Winslow. “They’d often share jokes together, kind of like they understood each other on a different level from the rest of us. And when Don would get low, which he often would, Rockwell would give him pep talks, telling him to pick himself up, get moving. And he’d show him how to correct the problem—it was always about work—and later we’d hear them laughing together over another private joke.”

Rockwell eventually found an agent for Don Winslow, and he tried hard to help him deal with his mood swings, which sadly, before the decade was over, would lead to suicide. Over the next few years, though, Winslow eased Rockwell’s studio demands, but, according to Jarvis Rockwell, Mary tried to get him to leave. She disliked the way the young man’s kinetic presence cut into the spousal intimacy she gained from being indispensable to her husband’s work. If she didn’t occupy that role, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with her life.

Throughout Rockwell’s enacting the decisions he had made long ago to sustain a workload that would succor his various psychological needs, he tried hard to function honorably as a family man. And he made sure that his family would continue to want him, in spite of his unavailability to them. Yes, he worked seven days a week, all year long; and true, he seemed slightly distant even in the
Post-
like routine pleasantness he bestowed on his wife and children. He had fed them just enough of himself, of his charm, his humor, his warmth, his caring, to make them want the real thing, the intimacy of a husband and father who saved his private best for them. But he withheld this part of himself so gracefully that it had taken his wife almost twenty years to dare accuse him of failing her. Mary had begun to lose hope of ever possessing her husband, and in that loss of faith and the waning of her belief in ever becoming the true object of desire for Norman Rockwell, her energy to fight her psychic demons faltered.

Probably in 1950—the letter is undated, but evidence suggests the year—Norman Rockwell wrote what was surely the most important and perhaps the only love letter of his life: “Dear Mary,” it began,

I love you devotedly and completely, Jerry and Tommy and Peter love you. They believe in you. They are fine boys due to your love and care.

I love and need you always. I know I am extremely difficult at times due to my absorbtion [
sic
] in my work. Sometimes it takes everything I have and all my time.

No one else but you could have helped and sustained me as you have for
twenty
years.

We have come a long way and I know we can, as a team go further and higher.

You are the finest person I have ever known. You are thoroughly and deeply
good.

You are surrounded by people who love you. Jerry, Tommy and Peter. The Edgertons, Miss Briggs, Mrs. Fisher, Jack and Max and every one in our valley and in Arlington. They all wish you well.

But most of all I love you completely and want you always.

If you decide you want to be free, I consent.

But I earnestly believe we can have our best lives together.

Norman

Obviously Mary, residing at Austen Riggs, had suggested a divorce, and Rockwell had taken her seriously. Tom Rockwell recalls with pain what a difficult time this period was for the entire family; Mary decided, for reasons still unclear to the sons, that she would only allow Peter to visit her, and turned away her husband and two older children. Peter remembers that he knew, somehow, that he was not to mention the family at all until he was instructed to do so. How did Rockwell explain Mary’s problem to their sons? All three claim that the matter was, just as before, never discussed; everybody just dealt with it, though they weren’t sure what “it” was. “All we knew was that my mother had some problems. She’d come back and forth over the years from treatments, and things would feel weird around the house,” Jarvis says today. “The mood, or the atmosphere, or something, wasn’t right. But that’s all, nothing more specific. In a way, that was the worst of all, not understanding, and nobody saying a word to help us figure things out.”

Still trying years later to figure things out, Tom Rockwell recalls, perplexed, that his father always encouraged his mother to do what she wanted, and that he urged her to hire people to help with his work and the household, instead of her taking on so much herself. “Pop just wasn’t the sort of man to boss someone around, especially his wife,” he says. “But my mother insisted on being in charge of things.”

Nancy Barstow Wynkoop believes that in light of her sister’s position as the eldest of three children, and the impression that Mary gave off that she received her sense of importance within the Barstow family by nurturing them all, it is no surprise that she would transpose that psychology onto her marriage. The obvious conduit to her husband was through his work, since that was what was most important to him. She couldn’t give up the household duties, since she measured herself against a feminine ideal, but she wanted to curry Rockwell’s dependence on her management of his professional life as well.

Studies of the differences between men and women alcoholics cite the surprising causal nature of women’s unfulfilled romantic or primary emotional relationships in their turning to drink to assuage their emptiness. The connection between depression and alcoholic abuse becomes circular in many cases, one breeding the other. And, as the psychiatrist son of Rockwell’s old friend and architect, Dean Parmelee, states, the biological factors for depression may well outweigh any cultural or social contributions anyway.

In the early fifties, Austen Riggs profiled its typical patient as twenty-seven years old, and collectively highly intelligent young people who have not “found themselves in terms of identity, personal relationships, capacity to work and to learn through study, or in self-direction.” The minority, the older patients, tended to be people who had “accomplished a great deal” but couldn’t solve their marital or vocational problems. Austen Riggs took as the goal of its therapy to provide immediate help that enabled its patients to get back on track in the outside world, while thereafter continuing treatment to eradicate their crippling neuroses. Individual psychotherapy and limited psychoanalysis, medication, and group interaction formed the core of their treatment options. As the decade progressed, innovative programs in drama, art, and dancing were also developed under highly trained professionals. Patients constructed a greenhouse on the property and began a daycare/nursery school as well.