Authors: Laura Claridge
The younger son was getting his share of attention too. In March 1914, the
Tatler
published the first known interview with Norman Rockwell. Rarely noticed by later critics searching for the illustrator’s motivations or aesthetics, the startling article follows in the wake of Rockwell’s summer at Provincetown: his involvement with John Fleming Wilson, the three-month depression and recovery, the brief reconnoiter with Wilson again, followed by the move to New Rochelle. In the period between arriving at Brown’s and this interview, Rockwell had spent his time painting or sketching a variety of subjects, and in an impressive span of styles. His answers to his interviewer, however, belie the turbulence and variety of the previous eighteen months, making it sound as though the artist was fixated on a regimen of boys and animals. In fact, he was responding to feeling hemmed in by his
Boys’ Life
job, which consisted of too much administration and too many “children only” illustrations. He was beginning to feel trivialized as an artist and was scared of getting his wings clipped before he had left the ground.
To his interviewer’s question “Do you like illustration work?” the twenty-year-old “tall, thin figure . . . [with] a big bass drum laugh” responded: “No, I hate it. It’s so cramped.” He explains by way of complaining that, for instance, in his current assignment, he is yet again forced to draw a baseball diamond, and that in spite of trying it from every possible new angle he can imagine, there is not much new he can think to do with it. And yet, “as long as authors continue to write baseball stories and as long as little boys continue to read them, I suppose I will have to draw them.” Asked “why don’t you give up illustration?” he responds, “I’m not big enough I suppose, and figuratively speaking the children must have shoes.” (The children, presumably, were his parents, whom he had certainly begun helping financially by this point.)
Rockwell continues candidly discussing the ways he might escape from his current field and strike out into new painterly directions: “I intended giving up illustration this winter and going to Norway for several months and studying the Norwegian and the Swedish painters, but my contracts interfered and my work piled up, so that it looks as if I wouldn’t get off before spring, if I am able to get away then.” Norway? Since this is the only such reference Rockwell will ever make, at least publicly, we can do no more than conjecture what he was thinking. Most likely, Charles Hawthorne’s open admiration for the turn-of-the-century Norwegian genre painting that emphasized fishing and farming suggested the itinerary to the Provincetown devotee.
The line of teachers under whom Rockwell had studied, from Chase to Bridgman to Hawthorne, represented the influences of the Düsseldorf and Munich schools, the first encouraging the Hudson River School’s attention to meticulous detail and high finish, the other urging more attention to color and brushstroke, with the painters of choice Rubens, Hals, and Velázquez. The German schools motivated a turn to the homey and domestic, and many of the students under their sway found their way to the north, to Norway and Sweden, where they resided in fishing and farming villages ready-made for such a painterly emphasis. Here the painters of the late nineteenth century, Rockwell’s teachers, could explore narrative painting, learning to create theatrical vignettes out of the everyday life of the villagers. Lured by such tales, as well as by more recent trips to lands north by Art Students League members including Rockwell Kent, whose name had already caused others to confuse the two men, the young illustrator was obviously considering what it would mean to follow their paths.
In addition, Edvard Munch hailed from Norway; he was a painter who represented solutions to Rockwell’s two major problems: a tendency to tighten up in his painting and its emotional correlative—a lack of spontaneity. The Norwegian painter effected moving, disturbing paintings with a very loose, expressive style that remained realistic as opposed to abstract. Conceptually, Munch painted the everyday men and women of his time, like Rockwell, and did not overly embellish or dramatize; yet his figures are haunting. In general, Norwegian and Swedish painters were associated with a more dramatic, gloomy content than other artists; and Rockwell had become increasingly concerned that he was getting trapped into children’s art. Seeking out its opposite was in many respects a logical idea.
But most surprising of all, the pragmatic Rockwell, who rarely theorized about life or art, philosophized about why he might redirect his life so dramatically: “The trouble is you only have one life and you might just as well take the risk of making a success or failure at the thing you want to do, as to make a partial but sure success of the thing you don’t like to do.” He hastened to smooth over any hurt feelings his apparent disloyalty might have caused: “Not that there isn’t a big field for illustration and not that there aren’t great illustrators; for example, I am a great admirer of Howard Pyle’s work. Of course, he is dead now, but he had the power to make his illustrations absorb the atmosphere of the story, you know.” This may well be the only record of Norman Rockwell suggesting that he wanted something more than being a great illustrator—and that he feared he wasn’t good enough to make it as a fine artist.
If Howard Pyle’s death in 1911 had occurred auspiciously for an ambitious student who now could fantasize taking the great man’s place, in retrospect, Pyle’s untimely demise almost immediately had become a symbol of an entire age on the wane. Already Rockwell’s nod in the great man’s direction conveyed subtle elegiac overtones for the profession whose greatest modern credibility rested on Pyle’s reputation.
Had he come to these conclusions courtesy of his father’s intervention during the terrible winter two years earlier, as he re-trod the countryside of his youth? It had taken a full-fledged depression to allow Rockwell the luxury of undirected thought, and now it seemed as if the floodgates had opened wide. “I am working like a dog,” he continued, explaining that, though he tries to wring every bit of imagination from the texts that he can, too often he is “continually being limited and bounded by the author, because your illustrations must agree with the text, and sometimes the author hasn’t the least idea what he is talking about.” Good student of George Bridgman to the end, he laments that an author “will have the man raise his left foot and throw the boulder with his right hand, which is an absolutely unnatural position, you know.”
Yearning to do “real” art, and admitting that he is growing tired of illustration, the artist nonetheless concludes with the ambivalence that underlies such bravura: “I know a little hamlet on the coast of Cape Cod where a man can live on three dollars a week, if he likes fish. Now, I don’t care anything about society—people taken collectively are a sham—singly they are companions. I think that it does a man good to be poor, especially an artist, he has a greater incentive to work. So this little hamlet would be ideal, if I liked fish. I don’t like fish, and there is always that eternal
if
in every man’s life.”
As Michele Bogart notes, Rockwell signals throughout his life that he enjoyed investigating modernist ideals; his aesthetic standards were, ironically and tragically, in fact similar to those of the very critics who ignored or belittled his work. But, so frozen was he in his own fear of leaving what he knew he could do and be loved for, he became the ultimate symbol of the reaction against Modernism and an escape from its ills.
And it is true that Rockwell was fundamentally at odds with contemporary notions of what an artist should be. Savvy art historians, realizing that the majority of celebrated modern artists from Monet to Jackson Pollock underwrote their bohemian, anticommercial posture with someone else’s money, have long smiled at the Romantic myth of the starving artist. In contrast, painters such as Rockwell, whose background had neither inured him to material desires nor allowed him the luxury to disdain them, openly sought financial success. If the day-to-day industriousness of illustrators as a class seemed plebeian to those artists who sought more ethereal rewards, Rockwell himself was wed to his desire for financial security. And such pursuit of economic stability allowed him a self-respecting way out of confronting the fear of failure that often plagues successful public figures interested in swerving from their expected paths.
At the same time that Rockwell gave this soul-searching interview, he was keeping long hours producing illustrations for
St. Nicholas, Youth’s Companion,
and
Boys’ Life.
Some pieces, like the charcoal sketch for George M. Johnson’s “A First Class Argument,” provided rewards beyond the monetary: Waring modeled for Rockwell’s drawing, information the illustrator wrote into his inscription on the piece fifty years later to the friend who bought it. Periodically throughout his life Rockwell would flirt with changing professional course, but he never again approached the crossroads that he did during the years from 1912 to 1914, before he had solidified the image that encouraged Americans to think they owned him.
To some extent, the beginning of World War I forestalled the urgency to make clear decisions about his career’s direction. All America was keeping watch, even though the majority of the country agreed that isolationism was its proper path. New Rochelle felt the European war’s presence particularly keenly, because Fort Slocum, located on Davis Island six hundred yards from the town’s shore, processed the most recruits east of the Mississippi. All around him, Rockwell’s acquaintances, hearty, strapping young men, enrolled in the armed services. And those who didn’t—the illustrators who comprised the New Rochelle Art Association, for instance—joined forces in the “poster” campaign, imitating luminaries such as James Montgomery Flagg, who had created the compelling image “Uncle Sam Needs You.”
Jarvis Rockwell was thinking about joining the Navy, but in 1914 he was just getting his job with a cotton goods company, C. E. Riley, under way. He had fallen in love with fellow boarder Carol Cushman, a lively, well-liked fledgling actress, whose few small roles in films had already gained her the beginnings of a reputation. “Actually, my mother was Willard Skinner’s girlfriend—he was one of the boardinghouse gang of friends—and then on the way back from taking Willard to the train for the Navy, my dad and mom decided they were made for each other,” Dick Rockwell says. Actually, to be more precise: according to a personal log Jarvis kept between September 19 and Willard’s departure on September 26, he actively pursued Carol, stealing his “first hug” at Willard’s going-away party, and his “first kiss” after taking Willard to the station the next evening.
Love letters between the two from 1914 to 1916 fill in the quotidian details of the Rockwells’ days, revealing, for instance, that Jarvis and Norman’s circle of friends all played golf. They walked a lot, too; in fact, much to his chagrin, the day after a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner, Norman and Waring had ambled off, while Jarvis got stuck storing summer clothes for Nancy: “I expect to feel called out for further duty any minute. Ma certainly can find lots of things to do when she starts puttering.” Consistent parental patterns finger Norman as Waring’s favorite, and Jarvis as Nancy’s.
On February 27, 1915, Carol’s parents gave a dinner party in honor of her engagement to Jerry, notice of which appeared in
The New York Times, The New York Herald,
and
The New York Press
a few days earlier. The following month, Jerry received a congratulatory note from an old friend, reminding the newly engaged man to tell “Norman not to do any stunts right away,” since everyone first needed time to get used to Jarvis’s engagement. Such advice implies some knowledge of the younger brother’s impulsiveness, the possibility that he would rush out and get married himself.
By the summer of 1915, the Rockwells were able to relocate from Brown’s to an even more upscale establishment at 39 Edgewood Place. Edgewood’s, as the boardinghouse was called, appealed especially to single teachers and other young professionals, so that opportunities for the sons to develop same-age friendships seemed limitless. Waring and Nancy themselves had developed into a more outgoing, social couple after Father Rockwell’s death in 1913. According to Jerry’s letters to Carol, his parents had taken dancing lessons the previous fall; and now Edgewood’s spirited camaraderie encompassed even the parental generation. Letters from Willard Skinner, the Rockwells’ good friend who had shipped out to Cambridge University Officers Training Center in England, emphasize his thwarted expectations at receiving so little correspondence from “the bunch” at Edgewood’s. Taking pity on the lonely Englishman, Nancy and Jarvis wrote him. Willard responded appreciatively, thanking them for their attention, and especially grateful for the local gossip they shared, but he suggested wistfully that it would be nice to hear from Norman. Indeed, when Norman mentions Willard in his autobiography, he simply notes that he was killed in action—and then he passes quickly on, missing not as much as a beat at the memory.
Norman’s failure to continue relationships once the friend was gone reverberated particularly loudly for the injured parties, because the artist so clearly enjoyed socializing in general. References by family, friends, and even newspaper reporters make it clear that he was one of the first to join a party. But he had already developed his striking tendency to concentrate only on the moment at hand; regardless of someone’s importance in his life, once the man or woman disappeared physically, the illustrator basically jettisoned the relationship. When Jerry writes to Carol on September 23 that he is meeting one of the Rockwells’ boyhood friends for dinner—“he and Norman and I are old friends. We were really brought up together”—it is understood that Norman will be too busy to join them. “He just never looked back,” his good friend and fellow illustrator Mead Schaeffer once reflected.
Sometime during the year, Rockwell had met fellow boarder Clyde Forsythe, a successful cartoonist ten or twelve years his senior. Together, the two men arranged to rent Frederic Remington’s old studio. A corrugated iron barn previously used for mammoth sculptures, the structure was uncomfortable year-round. But for Rockwell, the associations from those formative weeks in the country, where his first in-the-flesh artist, Ferdinand Graham, had alternated painting with flamboyantly galloping away on his steed, found perfect expression in this chance to inhabit the literal space of the great artist of the West. At least unconsciously, working in Remington’s shadow validated the illustrator, and his willingness to put up with the studio’s distracting temperature extremes attests to the psychological trade-off Remington’s aura provided.