May 20, 1916--The Baby Carriage marked the first appearance in the Saturday Evening Post for Norman Rockwell--the beginning of a 50-year association between the magazine and artist that would see another 321 of his illustrations land on the cover of that publication.
The 22-year-old artist was enthralled at the prospect of reaching “two million subscribers and then their wives, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, friends.” But for a long time, he believed that the disapproval of the Post’s legendary (and legendarily brusque) editor George Horace Lorimer would wreck his career before it had a chance to start. Only the constant prodding of a friend finally persuaded Rockwell to travel from Philadelphia and visit the offices of Curtis Publishing Co. to show his work to Lorimer.
To Rockwell’s surprise and delight, Lorimer accepted not only two of his finished paintings for covers (including The Baby Carriage) but also three sketches for future covers, paying him $75 for the work. Those works were immediate hits with the magazine’s subscribers, and over the years artist and magazine became permanently linked in the public mind.
(See my prior post on the last issue of the magazine.)
If you want to better understand the life and times of Rockwell, you can’t do better than visit the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., as I have done a couple of times over the years. Combine it with a trip to the museum and studio of another Stockbridge artist, the sculptor Daniel Chester French, and you will receive a full immersion in Americana.
Rockwell, working in the heyday of mass commercial art, caught the man on the street in his everyday world—at work, at home, at play. The emotions he evoked—heroism, patriotism, sentimentality—often appear to be relics of a bygone era. Yet the sight of these works summon forth more than a glimmer of recognition; they also induce stabs of wistful nostalgia and dreams of a more innocent, more reverend time.
The Norman Rockwell Museum opened in 1993, the successor to a smaller museum on the town’s Main Street that even years ago could no longer accommodate the flood of tourists making their way here. Today, the institution seems to be succeeding in its campaign to nudge the art elite toward appreciating an illustrator who may well have been the country’s best-loved artist.
Like Walt Disney, Rockwell came to stand for a folksy artistic idiom, a nostalgia for an America fading in a postwar age made anxious by totalitarian threats from abroad and self-questioning about our own commitment to liberty from within.
Art historian Robert Rosenblum has saluted Rockwell’s “mesmerizing (and) diverse powers.” Much of that versatility derived from the fact that Rockwell came along at a time of exploding interest in particular art forms.
As Rockwell began his career, boosts in education, prosperity, and leisure time had widened the American middle class. Book and magazine publishing, advertising, and public relations firms sprang into life and became sophisticated in reaching this group. Rockwell was the master who knew how to appeal to these people in whatever form he put his hand to: Saturday Evening Post covers, book illustrations, Hallmark greeting cards, advertisements, calendars, catalogs, commemorative stamps, booklets, and murals.
The America that Rockwell depicted, part of a world he ruefully acknowledged as “falling apart,” was populated by the earnest Boy Scout, the towheaded scamp, the gentle family doctor who made house calls, the winking soda jerk, the praying grandmother, and the unassuming hero back from winning a war.
Rendered in all their wrinkles, broken noses, bent knees, missing front teeth, and protruding bellies, they appear even more striking in the museum’s easel paintings averaging four feet square than on the smaller but more familiar Saturday Evening Post covers. “I guess I am a storyteller,” he observed, “and although this may not be the highest form of art it is what I love to do.” His rural models, unlike more sophisticated urban types, would rather die before trying to be like anyone else, he noted.
Midway through Rockwell’s career, during World War II, politicians and pundits, conscious of the nation’s new worldwide mission and burden, spoke of the “American Century” and “The Century of the Common Man,” sometimes practically in the same breath. The artist’s subjects represented the very epitome of that vision. Their geniality and the realistic style on which Rockwell relied for 60 years (he had long ago abandoned his “James Joyce-Gertrude Stein period,” he chuckled) put the artist out of favor with an art elite in thrall to the rebels and misfits who wanted not to paint the world but to reshape it.
By the end of his life, Rockwell’s American archetypes had expanded considerably. Now as much a symbol of his country as any of his characters, he was increasingly called on to paint the powerful and famous as well as the ordinary person: Dwight Eisenhower, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Ted Williams, and the Apollo 11 astronauts, among others.
More important, the end of his long association with the Post, which had long stipulated that blacks and other minorities could never be depicted in other than menial jobs, unshackled him. Rockwell’s work in the Sixties and Seventies for Look, McCalls, and even the leftist Ramparts became less lily-white and more multicultural, while also giving vent to his growing interest in such issues as poverty and civil rights.
More important, the end of his long association with the Post, which had long stipulated that blacks and other minorities could never be depicted in other than menial jobs, unshackled him. Rockwell’s work in the Sixties and Seventies for Look, McCalls, and even the leftist Ramparts became less lily-white and more multicultural, while also giving vent to his growing interest in such issues as poverty and civil rights.
Rockwell’s legendary productivity, resulting as much from a reluctance to say no, led to such stress that more than once he had to be treated for depression, a condition often hidden as a kind of shame in his lifetime.
The hundreds of works on display at the museum testify to the means of escape from his inner turmoil and the source of his creativity: the wider community. This, after all, was a man who admitted to knowing just about everybody who passed on the street below as he looked out the window of his Stockbridge home, a man who delighted in serving on the local dance committee when he wasn’t painting.
In his small New England town, he could see the entire world through fresh, untired eyes. “Don’t artists have an obligation to humanity?” he asked one of his sons. “...Does an artist live in a world by himself? Is it his only obligation to express his own insides, or does he have an obligation to keep?”
“I just painted life the way I wanted it to be,” Rockwell once said. He was being far too modest.
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