Norman Rockwell (58 page)

By the time they returned to Stockbridge, Rockwell felt rejuvenated, ready to put the thinking he’d done on this last trip to good use. He had come up with what he thought a fascinating reprise of
The Connoisseur.
At the end of 1965, Rockwell was once more interested in going abstract, as he again explored the breach between modern and traditional fine art, this time replacing Jackson Pollock with Picasso.

30

A Rockwell Revival

Look
published Rockwell’s latest take on cultural warfare on January 11, 1966. The painting once again emphasized Rockwell’s alliance with the new kids of his age, on the one hand, while proudly acknowledging his permanent place among the middlebrow, on the other. On the left side of the painting of a museum exhibition room, a housewife-next-door, appropriately if conservatively dressed except for the incongruous presence of curlers in her hair, stares, almost gawks at, a society portrait by John Singer Sargent. A small child clasps her hand, matching curlers in the little girl’s hair. To their right, facing a Picasso, stands a fashionable young woman dressed in jeans, her body language suggesting thoughtful study of the Cubist piece before her.

In the late twentieth century, Sargent would receive a long overdue reevaluation, partly in the wake of a new appreciation among the art world for portraiture and other figural painting. In 1966, however, he was considered not only old-fashioned; his society portraits, such as the one Rockwell has nicely reproduced here, were thought to be sellouts of the worst sort, prostitution of his talent to the commercial order. By showing the middlebrow viewers preferring the painter with such a reputation among the institutional powers, Rockwell acknowledged a similar truth about himself. After all, a Rockwell could hang in the same spot as the Sargent and the same “class” of viewers would pick his painting over a Picasso. Nonetheless, reputation be damned: Sargent was a painter’s painter, whom Rockwell had mentioned in the twenties as a powerful early influence on him.

But Rockwell stigmatizes “his” group as being unaware of proper museum protocol—no one was supposed to go to exhibitions in curlers—and paints the young, hip woman as typically attired for a member of her demographic. In 1966, however, wearing jeans to view fine art was just as striking a choice as the curlers. And in that moment of acceptance when Rockwell implies—again—that the kids are okay, he also gently prods the viewers into questioning their distaste for the less sophisticated underclass, the little child suggesting that such class divisions will continue to replicate, and that various sorts of art will be necessary to span the divide.

A “
Post
delegation” of three men, the new art director included, trekked to Stockbridge from Philadelphia on August 24, 1966, in order to persuade Rockwell to rejoin the magazine. His calendar notes record only elliptical remarks: “Give me contract or not anything. I want to do etc. etc. etc. NO.” A week later, Rockwell notes that he has written to the
Post
declining their offer. A letter from Allen Hurlburt written to Rockwell a full year earlier about the illustrator’s rejection of some “other people” expressed the art director’s pleasure that “things didn’t go so well” at that time; presumably, he was ensuring that Rockwell knew how much he was valued at
Look.

Until more correspondence is located, we can only conjecture as to the disagreements at the August meeting. Rockwell must have changed his position on contracts as a result of the increasingly dissatisfying
Post
covers he had been subject to over the last decade of his work; with no written agreement, the
Post
would be free to humiliate him again. And part of the deal would surely have had to include the freedom to continue working for other magazines,
Look
included, especially in light of the loyalty Rockwell now felt to Allen Hurlburt. In recent months, the artist had written Hurlburt of his deep gratitude for his “creative art direction.” Hurlburt, after all, “has given me the opportunity over and over again to paint pictures of contemporary subjects that I am fascinated with. I just have to express my thanks and, believe me, I am bending every effort to make my work worthy of the opportunities you are giving me.” The delegates from the
Post,
in contrast, must have failed to properly assess Rockwell’s commitment to an expanded professional arena.

Rockwell’s latest career negotiations ensued even as his sons were becoming accomplished artists in their own rights. Jarvis had been successful enough selling his work on the West Coast that he took an extended trip to Spain and Italy, riding a shiny new Vespa along the Mediterranean coast for several months during mid-1966. While visiting with Peter and Cinny in Rome, he began dating Susan Merrill, an American who was attending art school in Italy. He and Susan had met briefly some years before, but this time, something clicked, on Susan’s side “spurred on, no doubt, by his impressive months’-long tan and white blond hair; at the time, he seemed very Steve McQueenish,” she recalls.

They returned to the States together, and on September 10, 1966, they were married outside of Susan’s mother’s farm near Baltimore, Maryland, in a “homemade wedding performed under a ginko tree, complete with bagpipes and hippie wedding dress,” the bride relates. Rockwell records in his calendar notes the laconic “Jerry and Susan, married, nice day,” and is enthusiastically back in his studio the next day.

It was a period rich with creative opportunities for the illustrator, and he found renewed energies in being afforded such a variety of venues. He had recently sent
McCall’s
a script he penned for “Willie Was Different,” a story about an eccentric thrush who needed to do things his own way and to have his own solitary space in order to sing the extraordinary music that made him legendary. The only person who understood Willie and made such a life possible in the end was a spinster named “Miss Purdy,” a one-letter change from Molly’s school days as “Miss Pundy.”
McCall’s
asked for more text, and Rockwell’s wife expanded the bare plot into a fleshed-out story, with her husband rendering lavish drawings. The book was published as
Willie Was Different
in 1967. Although it is a lovely fairy tale of a story, both text and art, some people have wondered why Rockwell would call the bird by the same name as his famous World War II hero, Willie Gillis. Perhaps this was some kind of odd parallelism: Mary had named that protagonist, and now there would be another of the same name reserved for Molly.

Such concerns as Willie deflected from more serious moral issues, including Rockwell’s conflict, during the height of the Vietnam War, over whether to paint a series of six posters for the government. One would show an American soldier offering aid to a Vietnamese child. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, was to be the subject of the main picture, titled
A Leader of Men, an Officer of Marines.
Rockwell’s friend the Milton, Massachusetts, professional photographer Brad Hertzog—introduced to Rockwell by Molly several years before—accompanied the illustrator to Quantico, the Marine training base in Virginia. The men were given the royal treatment, and by the time they left, they thought they could justify accepting the commission.

Setting aside their niggling doubts, the two men enjoyed the flight home. Rockwell entertained the flight attendants by administering the Famous Artists’ School “talent test” that he now claimed “anyone can pass.” But once the men parted, each kept worrying over his acquiescence to a cause he did not fully support. They talked with their wives and called each other, agreeing to decline the offer. Rockwell wrote the Marines simply that “I just can’t paint a picture unless I have my heart in it.” He explained that he and his wife were of two minds about the project and alluded to the controversy over the war. In letters written in April and May of 1967, Rockwell indicated that his work for
Look
had kept him from completing Glenn’s portrait and promised to do it after the election of 1968, for which he was busy doing portraits of the candidates. But Rockwell never finished Glenn’s portrait or any of the other images in the series. In later media interviews, Rockwell would reiterate his wife Molly’s opinion that it wouldn’t be helping the Vietnamese to depict Marines doing such things as kneeling over to help a wounded villager, the subject of the second poster in the series. How much his wife’s politics, versus his own convictions, fueled his decision, is hard to determine, given his strong disinclination to hurt anyone or to give offense needlessly.

Finally, during 1967, Rockwell had the chance to collaborate with one of his children on a commission. The illustrator was to do the sketches for building panels at the Cathedral of the Pines in New Hampshire to honor the women war-dead of World War II, while his youngest son would execute the sculptures. Any professional father-son enterprise might be expected to be fraught with tension, and with artists, as Peter Rockwell has noted, any natural tension tends to be magnified. Invoking the loving but complicated relationship between Henri Matisse and his youngest son, the dealer Pierre, Peter Rockwell remains exasperated at his father’s insensitive reaction to his stone-carver son, almost losing the commission at one point, when the patrons decided to change artistic direction. “I had to really shake my father up, because he just said, oh, well, that’s that. He failed to see how important this was to me, both professionally and financially. As soon as I told him that I myself would call and complain, he got involved, and everything went off as planned.”

Rockwell’s exotic travels inured him to the more quotidian concerns of his sons, especially since he was willing to ensure their financial well-being, but when they confronted him, he rallied. Motivating him in part was his recognition that his life had changed dramatically in the past five years; his children often joked that they didn’t know where to find him. He and Molly traveled to Russia again during 1967, for instance, in between trips to England, Greece, and the Balkans. He was eager to study Socialist realist art, and she was interested in further exploring the school system that had intrigued them a few years earlier. On their return home, the illustrator took out the sketches he’d made of the earlier trip at the end of 1964, and created photo-realist finished oils of the children and their classroom that he then published in
Look.

In November, back in the states for the winter holidays, Rockwell painted another portrait of Richard Nixon, whose coldness he found a particular impediment. He confessed to Allen Hurlburt on the twenty-sixth that “It is no Rembrandt.” Rockwell had set up a temporary studio in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, where he got President-elect Nixon to pose for forty-five minutes. Of all the political figures from both ends of the spectrum that Rockwell painted, circumspectly refusing comment on their platforms, only Nixon earned truly negative comment from the painter. Rockwell was deeply disgusted at what he believed to be the then-candidate’s insincerity when he stopped two cleaning women in a hotel hallway and promised them that when he was in the White House, they could bring him their problems and be assured he would tend to them himself.

Before the year was over, the Corner House Museum opened on Stockbridge’s Main Street. A historical building formerly scheduled for demolition, the Corner House enjoyed great affection among local citizens, Molly Rockwell among them. Four townswomen waged a campaign to purchase the building, which they then turned into a historical society. Rockwell lent many of his oils, and before long, the museum became de facto the Norman Rockwell Museum. By the time of the artist’s death, the small exhibition space was attracting five thousand visitors yearly; during the following decade, the increase to over one hundred thousand would dictate that a real museum be built. Renowned architect Robert A. M. Stern would design the building, open to the public in 1993; Steven Spielberg and Time-Warner would endow it; and President Ronald Reagan would serve as honorary chairman of a five-million-dollar fund-raising drive. But for now, the nearly five thousand visitors a year to the little building amazed the townspeople.

Molly convinced her husband to spend much of his time the following year on getting his estate in some kind of order, enabling a real collection of his paintings to take shape. From its inception, the museum was Molly’s passion far more than Rockwell’s. Nonetheless, though he painted for a disposable consumerism, the artist had saved what would prove to be forty-five linear feet of fan mail and an equal volume of business correspondence. And he had drawers full of art reference plates and reproductions that he called on for his paintings. Soon it became clear that an all-out effort was warranted; the makings of some first-rate archives were at hand.

His sorting through decades worth of paintings and sketches was further motivated by a query from an important Manhattan dealer about the availability of some of Rockwell’s oeuvre for a late fall show. Excited, even incredulous judging from the letters at this time, the illustrator expended great effort deciding which work to include and arranging for loans of favorite pieces he had sold years earlier. From October to November 1968, the Bernard Danenberg Gallery mounted a fifteen-canvas exhibition of Rockwell’s work, the artist’s first New York City solo exhibition. Several times during the month, Rockwell stopped in to see how business was going. It wasn’t. Harry Abrams later enjoyed telling the story of Rockwell’s embarrassment as he sat forlorn, the night Abrams stopped in, while a long line of eager spectators waited outside the Whitney Museum to see the Andrew Wyeth exhibition. After all, five years earlier
Time
magazine had practically anointed Andrew Wyeth (son of illustrator N. C. Wyeth, favorite student of Howard Pyle) the real painter of the people in the long cover feature it published. “I want to show Americans what America is like,” Wyeth explained.