Norman Rockwell (56 page)

To be fair, there was a lot to think about. Rockwell’s professional as well as private life changed dramatically in 1961, when Ken Stuart resigned as art director from the
Post.
For the first year in its history, Curtis Publishing operated at a loss, and soon Ben Hibbs left the magazine as well. A totally revamped publication was announced, and Rockwell provided its inaugural cover showing the new art director at work redesigning the magazine. Eight covers followed at his hands, and they illustrate the dubious course the magazine had decided on. To achieve greater immediacy, the
Post
asked Rockwell to do portraits of international celebrities. His narrative abilities, his forte, fell into disuse.

But in 1961, the illustrator had reason to be flying high: Lane Faison, then the chairman of Williams College’s art department and respected in the art world, noted in
The Norman Rockwell Album
(basically Doubleday’s picture book accompaniment to the autobiography) that Rockwell was part of the tradition of humorous genre painters dating at least from seventeeth-century Holland, perhaps earlier, if some of the art appearing in the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts was included. Before 1961, others had frequently noted Rockwell’s shared lineage with Vermeer, but the ancestry began to solidify by this point. Almost forty years later, the critic Dave Hickey would use Vermeer and Dutch genre painting as a starting point from which to launch a reconsideration of Rockwell as a master of “democratic genre painting.”

Rockwell’s first painting of the new year surprised everyone, except the family members who had helped him create it.
The Connoisseur,
published as a
Post
cover on January 13, 1962, became the subject of compelling analysis in the late twentieth century, none of it certain of the painting’s meaning. The picture consists of a large drip painting—associated with Jackson Pollock’s style from the late forties and early fifties—which is studied thoughtfully by a middle-aged, prosperous-looking gentleman. The connoisseur’s expression is entirely hidden from us, as he faces the abstract painting, his back turned to us. The man and the painting form a kind of sandwich, with the space in between them—the judgment wrought by their meeting—left hanging in the air. The Pollock imitation is considered by most critics to be competently executed; certainly the intent is to represent the art respectfully, not to mock it. The expensively dressed spectator is accorded dignity as well. His stance is modest, his hands neatly clasped behind his back, in contrast to his rather dandified accoutrements of gloves and swell hat and suit. Clearly this scene between two culturally distinct quarters implies a confrontation—respectful and alert, quiet and contained. But instead of the all-too-obvious interpretive clue Rockwell usually provided, here the artist is mute.

Missed by recent commentators on the provocative painting, however, is Rockwell’s visual reference to an earlier
Post
cover from June 27, 1914, by Robert Robinson. Part of a narrative that Robinson had started in 1910, this painting uses variations on an “old codger,” as the cultural historian Jan Cohn states, to show the interaction of the modern and the old. The June 27 issue displayed the “geezer” facing off with a Cubist painting (then a new genre), the subject of which seems to be eyeballing him with even greater censure. Dressed in a hat, gray coat, and white gloves, the dated viewer holds a book on modern art in his left hand, using it as a study aid to the painting. In Rockwell’s version, the encounter is more of a tie; no one knows who won the standoff. Hat, gray coat, white gloves, older man, and reference book reappear—but this time, the man appears clearly educated, though presumably, given his attire, he may be no more receptive to the abstraction than the “geezer” was to Cubism.

The major difference between the two renditions lies in the ambiguity of Rockwell’s painting versus Robinson’s clearer narrative line. The baleful eye of the Cubist woman stares out reproachfully at the rube who can’t understand her, while the drip painting that Rockwell substitutes uses only the initials “JP” for any traditional narrative reference. And even here, at the moment most insistently Jackson Pollock’s, Rockwell’s presence intrudes; the usually affable man was known among illustrators and art editors for denouncing those art directors who omitted an artist’s signature.

But why the unusual (for Rockwell) narrative distance? As the cultural historian Wanda Korn explains, a strong influx of cartoons that mock viewers’ attempts to interpret abstract art, as well as the vagueness of the art itself, had by now become a staple of mainstream culture. Only a year earlier, for instance, a Peter Arno cartoon in
The New Yorker
had exemplified such a theme: two city gentlemen of the same type as Rockwell’s beholder study a Pollock painting and render a heavy-handed, silly, connoisseurial judgment. One says to the other, “His spatter is masterful, but his dribbles lack conviction.” And even in the late eighteenth century, cartoons that poked fun at those who bought art for reasons of prestige rather than from admiration proliferated.

Against this tradition, however, Korn sets out the equally potent one that honors the man (often an artist himself) who stares contemplatively at a piece of art. Daumier, for instance (significantly, best known as an illustrator himself), painted a man whose profile allows the spectator to see him admiring a reproduction of the Venus de Milo. He called the painting
Le Connoisseur.

The
Saturday Evening Post
readers were confused by Rockwell’s cover: what was their man trying to tell them? One of the three printed letters to the editor expressed indignation at this foray into enemy territory, one amusement that implied Rockwell was mocking the abstract painters, and one a sense of surprise that the illustrator had it in him to produce a reasonable imitation of real art.

It is impossible to appreciate the significance of Rockwell’s story on this January cover, however, without taking seriously the rueful statements he made to others about his place in the art world. “Often Pop would tell me that someone had come up to him and said, ‘ “I don’t know anything about art, but I sure like your stuff.” I wish it were the opposite—that they’d tell me, “I know lots about art and I really love your work,” ’ ” recalls Peter Rockwell. The illustrator had swallowed his unhappiness at being taken out of the category of “artist” long ago, but he was still capable of kicking up his heels in protest.

And he was too intelligent a painter and too capacious and inclusive a thinker to scorn things abstract or modern. He liked and admired modern art, but
Post
patriarch George Horace Lorimer’s disapproval had largely caused the painter to “realize” in 1932 that he was meant to continue along the path he had already taken. Not only is Rockwell the narrator recommending tolerance for aesthetic crosscurrents in
The Connoisseur,
he is championing the right of abstract painting to take its canonical place in the museums. Gently, Rockwell positions the ersatz Pollock as a wake-up call to those who have admired the illustrator’s work largely because they felt comforted by its anti-art implications. In this generous process, he is also implying his own contribution to the history of art, balancing the gently agonized, red dripping letters—JP—on the upper right portion of the canvas, against the traditional block signature, Norman Rockwell, positioned directly below.

The picture is not without flickers of condescension: the dramatic red initials of Pollock’s name mock the Action Painter’s self-importance. But the painter-narrator patronizes the other side as well, anointing the precise-looking gentleman with a swirl of abstract paint atop his bald pate, and arranging the sparse hair itself around his head to echo the shapes of the painting’s drips.

By entering the drip picture alone in a local art contest at the Berkshire Museum, where he won second place, and by sending it to a Cooperstown art show under an assumed name, Rockwell further seemed to mock abstract painting. And he did succumb to various offhand comments implying a subtext of contempt for the vagaries of drip painting versus the craft of traditional easel work. When Jackson Pollock had been crowned the probable “best painter in the world” by
Life
during 1949, the magazine had published a picture of Pollock in his infamous “crouch” position; now, as he worked on
The Connoisseur,
Rockwell had Louis Lamone photograph him in the same pose.

Of course, by 1962, the fuss in the art world wasn’t about Abstract Expressionism anymore anyway; those battles had been won, and Pop Art’s ascendancy reflected a renewed emphasis on representation and the figure. Rockwell was too close to the traditions of academic narrative painting to benefit from the turnaround, however, and his painting implies his awareness of this irony as well. In the January 1962 issue of
Esquire,
he explained, “I call myself an illustrator but I am not an illustrator. Instead I paint storytelling pictures which are quite popular but unfashionable.”

Molly discouraged Norman’s spending what she considered a disproportionate amount of energy on such issues anyway. She believed in the lessons inherent in her strong New England background, which emphasized activity and movement, not contemplation. To escape the end of the Massachusetts winter and greet spring sooner than Stockbridge would allow, the couple went to Hollywood, where Rockwell did research for two books scheduled for publication at the end of the year,
Poor Richard’s Almanac
and
Folk Heroes of the Old West.
He relayed his progress to the
Famous Artists Magazine
for their spring report, which also printed recent news from Ben Shahn and Will Barnet, two somewhat hip instructors who had helped update the institute’s reputation. And to Helen Macy, who had assumed control of the Heritage Press, he wrote that Molly and he had spent innumerable hours in Philadelphia ensuring the authenticity of his illustrations for the
Almanac.

Late in 1963 and into the following year, the Rockwells undertook some serious travel, flying to Russia on behalf of the State Department’s international art initiatives and to Egypt in order for Rockwell to paint President Gamal Nasser’s portrait. In the U.S.S.R., Rockwell traveled as a “specialist” under the aegis of the United States Information Agency. He attended the nation’s equivalent of the World’s Fair, the Exhibit of Economic Achievements of the Soviet Republics, where he shared a raised platform with three other American artists, all of whom were supposed to work in front of the crowds of visitors, showing them their particular techniques. Rockwell, who was temporarily suspended from the show when an unusual-looking intellectual whom he painted realistically complained that the portrait was a caricature aimed at mocking him, pulled the most interesting-looking people out of line and did rapid oil sketches, exhibiting his ability to paint loosely when he wanted. The sketches, each of which had to be completed within an hour, are evocative and intelligent, but the lack of finish, perhaps because of what we’ve come to expect from Rockwell, diminishes their power. More successful are the photodocumentary-type paintings he did of a Russian classroom.

The portrait of Egypt’s Nasser would be the artist’s last cover for the
Post.
Rockwell did not enjoy portrait painting, according to at least one interview he gave, and his knowledge that the
Post
would allow him little else nowadays stemmed any nostalgia he might have felt when he realized the magazine was dying. Both
Look
and
McCall’s
began negotiations to secure his services, and though he was flattered at the almost desperate entreaties of the latter, he realized that
Look,
known for its aesthetic quality, would afford him the greatest chance to branch out into the humanitarian pictures he wanted to paint.

Look
magazine was in the midst of its short-lived “golden years” when Rockwell agreed to work for it. Dan Mich had returned as editor after a long hiatus, and
Collier’s
and the
Post,
the magazine’s longtime rivals, were breathing their last, leaving the field open. It expanded its foreign coverage, it published a series on religion by Leo Rosten, and it chronicled the rise of racial tension in the South. This last emphasis most engaged Rockwell’s interest, and he would produce what are arguably some of his most effective, moving paintings for the inside, not the covers, of
Look
magazine, before it began its decline in 1966. And the relationship with art director Allen Hurlburt that began in the fall of 1963 would prove enriching, not constricting, and allow him, at the age of sixty-nine, yet another significant chapter in his long career.

Rockwell’s turn to an entirely different theme, centered on the most radical kind of disharmony experienced in the United States, creates a dramatic counterstatement to his decades of illuminating cultural harmony. In this conversion, he leaves the more domestic, feminine world of the beautiful—the small and ornamental and local—for what Michael Fried calls, in speaking of the American realist Thomas Eakins, the “figural sublime.” Literary writers on the sublime, including Thomas Weisel and Harold Bloom, have most often cast this aesthetic as a powerful struggle against one’s artistic forebears in an effort to clear space. For Rockwell, the new sublime is a pronouncement that he is willing to pit himself against painterly representations of big ideas. He had been eager to go in such a direction since at least 1943, when he called the Four Freedoms “the big idea pictures,” but at that time he was yoked to positive representations only.

This same year, incongruously enough, he painted the portrait of Barry Goldwater, “a remarkable cranium to draw, tho I’m not sure what’s inside it,” he quipped; then he traveled three weeks later to the White House, to paint the curmudgeonly Lyndon Johnson. “He was very brusque when I went into his office,” Rockwell recalled, “and when I asked for an hour to make sketches he almost hit the ceiling. He told me the best he could afford was twenty minutes and told me to get cracking. I decided to do the best I could, but he was just sitting there glowering at me. I finally said, ‘Mr. President, I have just done Barry Goldwater’s portrait and he gave me a wonderful grin. I wish you’d do the same’—and for the rest of the session he sat there with a fixed smile like he was competing for the Miss America title.”