About the Author
----------------
Fred Bauer has written more than a dozen books, including the
How Many Hills to Hillsboro?, Everett Dirksen: The Man and His
Words, and Then Sings My Soul (with George Beverly Shea). Born in
Ohio, he has worked widely in communications and with radio,
newspapers, and magazines.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
--------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers
Norman Rockwell Portrayed Americans as Americans Chose to See
Themselves
Norman Rockwell began his career as an illustrator in 1910, the
year that Mark Twain died. He sold his first cover paintings when
there were still horse-drawn cabs on the streets of many American
cities, and he began his association with The Saturday Evening
Post in 1916, the year in which Woodrow Wilson was elected to a
second term in the White House and the year in which Chin's
movie The Floorwalker broke box office records across the
country. Young women were enjoying the comparative freedom of
ankle-length skirts, and their beaux were serenading them with
such immortal ditties as “The Sunshine of Your Smile” and “Yackie
Hacki Wicki Wackie Woo.” In literature this was the age of Booth
Tarkington, Edith Wharton, and O. Henry. Ernest Hemingway, still
in his teens, was a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, and F.
Scott Fitzgerald—soon to become a frequent contributor to the
Post—was still at Princeton. The New York Armory show of 1913 had
introduced the American public to recent trends in European
painting, but traditional values still reigned supreme in the
American art world. Only a handful of artists aspired to anything
more novel than the mild postimpressionism of painters like John
Sloan and Maurice Prendert. The movies were becoming a potent
force in popular entertainment, but few people took them
seriously or thought they might one day take their place
alongside established art forms.
It was a world in transition, but the transition had not yet
accelerated to the giddy speed it would achieve in the twenties.
People could be thrilled by the exploits of pioneer aviators
without being conscious of the impact that flying machines would
have on modern warfare. It was possible to enjoy the conveniences
provided by such relatively new inventions as the telephone, the
phonograph, the vacuum cleaner, and the automobile without being
too troubled by the notion that technology might someday soon
threaten the established order of things.
The illustrator and cover artist working in the mid-teens of the
twentieth century was generally asked to embody established
values. The latest model Hupmobile Runabout might well be the
subject of a given picture—an advertisement, perhaps—but the
people who were shown admiring or driving in the newfangled
vehicle were presumed to espouse the same values as their parents
and their grandparents. The set of the jaw, the glint in the eye
had not changed much since the middle of the nineteenth century.
The women wore their hair a little differently, perhaps, and men
were doing without beards, but these are superficial differences.
The fact is that the minds of the people who edited and bought
magazines like Colliers, Country Gentleman, Literary Digest, and
The Saturday Evening Post had been formed, to a large extent, in
the Victorian era.
Norman Rockwell himself, born on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan, had a classic late Victorian upbringing. He spent his
childhood in a solidly middle-class, God-fearing household in
which it was the custom for his her to read the works of
Dickens out loud to the entire family. Thus Rockwell had little
difficulty in adapting to the conventions that were current in
the field of magazine illustration at the outset of his career.
Although a New Yorker, he was especially drawn to rural subject
matter (he is on record as saying that he felt more at home in
the country). This reinforced his affection for traditional
idioms, since it focused his attention on the most conservative
elements of the population, those who were least susceptible to
change of any kind.
In short, Rockwell began his career right in the mainstream of
the illustrators of his day, sharing the assumptions and concerns
of his contemporaries and of the editors who employed him. His
work is remarkable because he sustained through half a century
the values that he espoused in those early days when the world
was changing more drastically than anyone could have imagined
possible. It would be easy enough, of course, to find fault with
his refusal to break with those values, but that would be unjust.
Rockwell simply continued to believe in what he had always
believed in, and in his own way, he did, in fact, change and grow
throughout his career. He learned how to embrace the modern age
without abandoning his own principles. But he was also forced to
modify and enrich his approach to the art of illustration in
order to reconcile those principles to a world that was evolving
so fast it seemed, at times, on the verge of flying apart.
His earliest paintings are conventional, almost to the point of
banality, because the values they embody could be taken so much
for granted. As he was forced to deal with a changing
environment, however, he was obliged to become more inventive and
original. A situation that could be presented in the simplest of
terms in 1916, for example, might still be valid a quarter of a
century later, but only if it were made more specific.
Stereotypes had to be replaced by carefully individualized
characters. More and more detail had to be introduced to make a
situation more particular. As time passed, Rockwell was called
upon to draw on all his resources as an illustrator in order to
put his audience—which was always changing—along with him. As
circumstances became, theoretically at least, more hostile to his
kind of traditional image-making, he rose to the challenge. His
work became richer and more resonant, reaching a peak in the
forties and fifties when most of the men who had been his rivals
at the outset of his career were already long forgotten. His most
remarkable quality was his ability to grow and adapt—to remain
flexible—without ever modifying the basic tenets of his art.
What seems to have enabled him to do this was a belief in the
fundamental decency of the great majority of his fellow human
beings. This belief was the most deep-seated of all his values,
and it enabled him to perceive a continuity in behavior patterns
undisturbed by shifts in social mores. The twentieth century has
offered plenty of evidence of man's ability to shed his humanity,
and Rockwell was certainly aware of this, yet he clung to his
belief and decency. It was an article of faith, and it gave his
work its particular flavor of innocence.
Over the past hundred years or so, artists and critics have been
ambiguous in their attitudes toward innocence. The "naive" vision
of such painters as Henri Rousseau has been much prized, yet more
schooled artists have often been led astray when they attempted
to embrace such a vision (indeed it would be difficult for such a
vision to survive schooling). Picasso, the most protean of all
twentieth-century artists—greatly admired by Rockwell, it should
be noted—was able to run the full gamut: from a childlike delight
in transforming bicycle parts into the likeness of a bulls head
to the nightmare vision of Guernica—but Picasso was, in every
way, an exception to the rules.
Rockwell's art has nothing, of course, to do with the innovations
of modern painting. He was essentially a popular artist—an
entertainer—and he was always fully aware that his work was
intended to be seen in reproduction. The originals—generally
painted on a relatively large scale—are, however, beautiful
objects in their own right. He was looking to the general public
rather than to a small, highly informed audience, and it was this
perhaps that enabled him to sustain the innocence of his vision.
Dealing with mass communication rather than the higher reaches of
aesthetic decision-making, he has no place in the developing
pattern of art history. It is futile even to compare him with
American realists like Edward Hopper, whose subject matter
occasionally had something in common with Rockwell's. Hopper was
always concerned primarily with plastic values, as is the case
with any "pure" painter. Rockwell, on the other hand, had to
think first and foremost about conveying information about his
subject, as must be the case with any illustrator. An illustrator
may, of course, have many of the same skills as the "pure"
painter, but he deploys them in a different way. Essentially he
borrows from existing idioms of easel painting—whether
traditional, as in Norman Rockwell's case, or more experimental,
as was the case with his notable contemporary Rockwell Kent—and
uses them as a means of conveying information. Interestingly, it
is known that Norman Rockwell himself, during the twenties, was
drawn to modern idioms-the result of a sojourn in Paris—but
rejected them in favor of older conventions. The reason for this,
we may suppose, was his re of the fact that his gift was
not painterly at all (remarkable as his painterly skills were).
It was, rather, his ability as a pictorial storyteller.
Most of Rockwell's finest covers are, in effect, anecdotes. With
occasional exceptions, he can give us only one scene—an isolated
episode—but, in his mature work especially, he knows how to pack
that scene with so much significant detail that the events that
precede it, and follow from it, are, so to speak, latent in the
single image. A great short story writer, like Guy de Maupassant,
can conjure up a whole life within the span of a dozen pages.
Rockwell, at his best, was capable of doing the same kind of
thing with a single picture. Because of this he deserves to be
thought of as something more than just an illustrator. An
illustrator, by definition, is someone who takes another person's
story (or advertising copy) and adds a visual dimension.
Rockwell, in his cover art, went far beyond this. He was not only
the illustrator, but also the author of the story. In his work,
image and anecdote were inseparable; each sprang naturally from
the other…