Authors: Laura Claridge
Those who have systematically collected the accounts of Rockwell’s models have awaited in vain any significant variation on this theme. Men and women, girls and boys, who posed for the illustrator believed themselves touched by a great man. To some extent, Rockwell did invest his models with the importance they assumed, but while they functioned for him primarily as props in his imagined world, to them he seemed closer to a creator.
Sue Erikson Bloland, whose family became close to Rockwell and his children in the 1950s, believes that much of what she has concluded about her own father, Erik Erikson, was equally applicable to the illustrator—Erikson’s patient as well as a good friend. To believe that someone exists who is better than ourselves seems to be a basic human need, at least in Western societies. People seek fodder for the culture’s fantasy constructions of heroes. We want others to be bigger than life, to justify our own frequent sense of insignificance. Rockwell, similar to Erikson, filled this role for his public, though in the artist’s case, a matter-of-factness, in conjunction with his low-key but friendly affect, heightened his idiosyncratic charisma.
Rockwell’s ordinariness, in other words, was the base of his celebrity. As part of his (simultaneously real and contrived) identifi-cation with the people who bought the magazines that subsidized his career, Rockwell fostered an image of normalcy from his earliest success. Especially amid the profligacy of the Roaring Twenties, Lorimer’s conservative—or, perhaps more accurately, libertarian—leanings devalued the
Post
among intellectuals, artists, and the social elite. A certain lack of fashionableness clung to it, even though the editor hired the best writers money could buy. For Rockwell, this meant that respect for his aesthetic achievement increasingly became concentrated among the striving, solidly middlebrow, middle-class readership, with the members of his own social and artist class admiring him more for his fame and income. What appeared to be his own propensity to depend on hard work instead of inspiration, his concern over tending those on his own doorstep instead of worrying about global issues, furthered the domestication of his image as an artist.
But while his everyman persona created devotion among his middlebrow audience, it devalued him in the institutional art world. And the popular press inadvertently helped bury him in the eyes of serious critics. An interviewer from the
Globe
noted approvingly the “peculiar appeal in Rockwell’s work. His favorite subject is boys, good, wholesome boys not of the Smart Alec type, and he would rather catch some home-going subway rider smiling over the realism of his work than receive plaudits on his technique from a dozen fellow artists.” Misleading in its implication that Rockwell preferred “their” judgments to those in the art world proper, the comparison does represent accurately the illustrator’s early, almost obsessive desire that the public love his work.
Repeatedly, he would be damned by the praise of journalists eager to celebrate his difference from “real” painters. One admiring interviewer observed that “Norman Rockwell is not a Greenwich Village artist who wears McDougal [
sic
] Alley airs, long hair and immaculate smocks with a silk tie carefully arranged. He hasn’t even the regulation Van Dyke beard. No, Norman Rockwell is just a plain, ordinary, clean, likeable young fellow.” Even Rockwell’s mundane brand of pipe tobacco is offered as an example of his normalcy.
The following summer, the
Sun
chimed in: “If you should take a walk or a drive around New Rochelle, or if, by chance, you happen to live there, you probably will find nothing peculiar or anything smacking of Washington Square’s Washington Mew [
sic
] or Macdougal Alley. Yet New Rochelle boasts at least as many well-known artists and writers as Greenwich Village. You will notice no dreamy eyed, long haired, unpressed velvet trousered young men wandering about the streets of New Rochelle.” Instead, the writer continues, you might see a “laughing, curly-haired young man walking down North Avenue to his studio”—Norman Rockwell; or “on Main street, going home to his wife in Sutton Manor, a good looking, youngish man, without a hat and probably cleanly shaved”—the debonair Coles Phillips. The piece continues smugly to note the lack of patronizing attitudes or affectations among New Rochelle artists, who, except for once a year when the “arts people” gather for their annual Travers Island party and stay out all night, are a “healthy, normal New Greenwich Village.”
Throughout the early twenties, popular journalists sought to rehabilitate the very idea of an artist at Rockwell’s expense, though they meant to do him a service. They were playing out a war of self-esteem, using Rockwell as their redemption. Major Manhattan critics were comfortably well informed about the modern artists in their midst; whether for or against the contemporary art largely inspired by European painters, such commentators on the current scene felt themselves to be in the know. Suburban journalists, however, assumed that the haughtiness or supercilious response aimed at them by urban artists showed them up as country mice to their city cousins; in truth, they often didn’t like or understand the new painting sanctioned by the New York art world.
This divide between the cognoscenti and the untutored American masses would only deepen throughout the twentieth century. The Westchester County newspapers’ relief at the famous painter Norman Rockwell’s affability and accessibility—his personality seeming to mimic his audience-friendly art—anticipated the future, when Rockwell’s work would become a symbol for a middle-class, often well-educated audience that felt itself scorned for its aesthetic preferences. That members of the professional ranks comprising the intelligentsia of 1950 would feel compelled to hide their love of Rockwell is no surprise; that suburban journalists in the early 1920s were already defensively detailing his virtues as a normal versus “different” artist sets the tone from the beginning of his career for the ambivalent reception that would span it.
A subtext of confusion over exactly what and how to consider Rockwell—as “just” an illustrator or as an artist—also fueled the early interviews that protectively lauded the painter’s ordinariness. Most full-time illustrators, for instance, couldn’t take enough time off from work to stay out all night like the Greenwich Village “types” the journalists scourged—and among whom Rockwell would have enjoyed a party or two himself. In 1920, in addition to his eleven covers for the
Post,
Rockwell published six covers for the second most popular American magazine,
Life.
Two of them show Rockwell developing the same idea, but in such radically different visual terms that the viewer can only laud the stylistic difference.
Life
’s July 1 cover,
Carrying On,
depends upon a triangular arrangement of a young father, mother, and baby backed by an inverted triangular figure of a soldier running forward, bayonet and gun at the ready. The smiling father, gazed at expectantly by his wife, represents the future of postwar America, a seal lettered with the words “American Legion” behind the mise-en-scène.
Life
’s August 12 cover,
Fortune Teller with Young Couple,
again employs the triangular format, with the gypsy fortune-teller in the background reading an incredulous-looking young man’s palm, his sweetheart wriggling happily off to the side. The lush brushstrokes of the latter scene emphasize the Romantic treatment of an already sentimental subject, while the emphasis on angular lines in the earlier cover recalls the leanness of the war times just past. Of the twenty-eight covers that Rockwell provided for
Life
between 1917 and 1924, sixteen would relate specifically to the Great War. In nearly every case, as in these two postwar paintings, the narrative content emerged from a contrast between the past and the hopes for a future immediately over the horizon.
In 1920, Rockwell also began a series of twenty full-color oils for Edison Mazda Lampworks, the commissions continuing through 1927. (He completed eight in 1920 alone.) In the beginning, the company paid him $800 per painting, raising his fee to $1,500 at the end of his tenure. Reproduced mainly in the Curtis publications, the
Post
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
the paintings were some of his most masterful renderings of light and illumination, compelling enough that many of them stand on their own, quite outside the advertising series. Throughout his career, Rockwell took great pleasure in representing light sources, but he never concentrated more attention on the challenge than in this impressive series of intimate social scenes, staged with characters of all ages.
Quite apart from the intrinsic aesthetic merits of the assignments, or the monetary rewards, Rockwell also lavished exceptional detail on the ads because, in 1918, Maxfield Parrish, a former student of Howard Pyle’s at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and an illustrator whom Rockwell deeply respected, had begun to publish his own series of lushly colored full-page ads for the electric company, a commission he would complete only in 1934. In later years, when asked to reflect on Parrish, Rockwell first lamented that the long-term ad campaigns that Parrish conducted for Edison Mazda as well as his other extensive commitments to advertising art seduced him away from the best use of his talent, “toward greater income” instead. But after Rockwell revisited Parrish’s original paintings at a special exhibition, where he was able to see the work the artist completed for purposes other than commercial commissions, he found himself “completely reconverted” from his earlier agreement with those illustrators who blamed Parrish “for the loss of the ideals of American illustration.” Because he had seen Parrish’s oeuvre in the context of the painter’s entire life, he could again celebrate the artist as “a great technician, a true lover of beauty, a magic colorist and an original humorist.”
The Edison Mazda advertisements forced Rockwell to think about the ways that electricity had enabled the march into modernity, since that was the major thrust of the company’s campaign. Efficiently, the illustrator made the logical transition from these ads to painting other pictures symbolizing the contraries of past and future. When, for instance, Rockwell painted his
Memories
cover for
Literary Digest
(June 25, 1921), the Roaring Twenties had already imprinted its fashion sense on women, but the illustrator instead presents us with a young woman, sitting in an attic among old family relics, lost in thought spawned by examination of pasts not even her own. Painting with obvious reference to the styles of Rembrandt and Vermeer, he lights the scene from a single source, so that the delicate girl, her illumination seeming both natural and otherworldly at the same time, is set apart from the clutter in her midst. The domestic umbers, ochres, and siennas of the attic’s collection of wood, brass, and fabric objects contrast with the breezy blues and whites of the girl’s clothes, so that her figure glows against the worn surfaces.
What is peculiarly missing from this worldview is the present, a place where the woman is grounded in the particularities of the actual moment. And in that lack, the viewer intuitively enters and completes the painting. The art historian Kathleen Grant aptly glosses this arena: “[It is as] if her thoughts have truly elevated her from the world of dusty realities to a world of glistening dreams. . . . Rockwell paints the girl at the very moment that the dream takes shape behind her quiet eyes—but before it can be reflected in her face. In doing so, he does not suggest the nature of the girl’s fantasy but instead invites us to speculate according to what
we
see—or wish to see—in the painting.”
Reluctantly denying himself the painterly challenges that held his attention in the Edison Mazda campaign, Rockwell acquiesced to the enticements of the Orange Crush corporation, though the quid pro quo was strictly money—lots of it—for work. Impressed by his paintings for Edison Mazda, the soda company convinced Rockwell to sign on for a twelve-painting series of ads, largely through the help of the illustrator’s wife, who egged him on in spite of his reservations. After four full-color paintings, he got out of the deal, vowing in the process never to get trapped in an inviolable contract again. Short agreements he could handle; lengthy commitments hedged him in on every level, from the artistic to the logistical to the geographic. He liked his freedom too much to feel owned, he often asserted, and the amount of advertising he undertook was already prodigious. To be at the mercy of an agency’s art director was intolerable.
Rockwell’s aversion to long-term contracts was encouraged by Leyendecker, whose four decades with the
Post
never included a written agreement. But a cautionary tale anchored Leyendecker’s freedom to a more mundane reality: without such contracts, the illustrator was never sure of the next month’s income. The “fine artist” assumed that penury might be the price of refusing to sell out by going commercial; the social honor attached to such possible poverty seemed some recompense. But the burden of financial success was ever-present to illustrators, who recognized the trade-off their artistic choices were supposed to purchase: economic stability in lieu of romantic individuality. When offers failed to arrive in time, the illustrators were therefore badly compromised, both practically and emotionally. Leyendecker had dealt with these issues by deciding to live always just beyond his means, declaring that such practices would dictate his continued work and discourage any laziness. Instead, as Rockwell noted in his autobiography, the illustrator was forced to accept too many advertising commissions when other work slowed, and eventually his creative output suffered, further stalling the high-paying cover assignments he had come to expect.
Not that Rockwell was immune from investing in glamour. Partly because of Irene’s predilection for the good life, but also as personal recompense for his “deaconish” behavior back in his Art Students League days, when Rockwell worked while others took time off, he allowed himself to play at the decadence that accompanied the twenties as they roared into wealthy Westchester County, taking few prisoners among the upwardly mobile. At the same time, he was keenly aware of his position at the
Post,
which reached the peak of its success in this decade, when, according to cultural historians, it became “a dominant force in middle-class culture.” Although intellectuals tended to scorn the magazine early on for its ostensible appeal to middlebrow readers, the quality of many of its fiction writers of the period speaks well for the purportedly undereducated classes: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frank Norris, Stephen Vincent Benét, Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, as well as early works by Carl Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To such evidence of its omnibus appeal, critics replied that illustrious writers had only their second-rate work published by the
Post,
circular reasoning at best.