Norman Rockwell 1894-1978

By Lori Stranger

Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With, 1964, oil on canvas, 91cm x 150cm, Norman Rockwell Museum, Massachusetts.

"Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed’ - Norman Rockwell.

What was it about Norman Rockwell’s sentimentality and graphic photo-realist style that attracted millions of Americans? Why have his paintings endured and continued to influence contemporary pop culture such as Lana Del Ray’s 2019 ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ album and the 1994 Oscar-winning movie, Forrest Gump? To understand his legacy one has to learn his origin.

Born to a manager of a textile company, Norman Percevel Rockwell has become an icon of American culture. A country boy at heart, Rockwell never forgot his summers spent in the New England countryside which continued to inspire his later sentimentalised depictions of small-town American life. His artistic career, however, can be said to have begun in the Big Apple, New York City. At fourteen he began taking classes at The Chase School of Art where he was exposed to James McNeil Whistler and John Singer Sargent’s paintings. Within two years, his artistic skill and passion for the craft encouraged him to pursue a serious career, dropping out of high school and enrolling at The National Academy of Design. Under the direction of Thomas Fogarty and George Bridgman, who he met at the Art Students League of New York, he was encouraged to draw illustrative covers for magazines for which he displayed an obvious talent. By 19 Rockwell became the editor of the Boy’s Life magazine published by the Boy Scouts of America.

His early success encouraged him to submit to the popular Saturday Evening Post, for which he subsequently designed an unprecedented 25 covers between 1916 and 1919. Gaining notoriety, he soon became a feature on Life Magazine, which the artist dubbed the ‘greatest show window in America’.

Unlike Edward Hopper, to whom the artist has been retrospectively compared, Rockwell’s works feature a patriotic tone that is absent in Hopper’s isolated figures. The 1941 attack on Pearl harbour brought the European world war to US shores and encouraged Rockwell to pursue more serious subjects and a social realist style. In 1943, Rockwell painted his four Freedom paintings that promoted freedom of speech, worship, want and fear, particularly powerful in light of the German oppressor. The series was hugely successful, garnering the employment for war propaganda purposes by the US government and resulting in $130 million worth of donations to the war effort.

His later career, however, witnessed a more critical political edge departing from his earlier patriotic espousals. The violent southern racial tensions of the 1960s and segregation policies inspired Rockwell to paint his 1964 piece, Look, The Problem We All Live With. The scene immediately alerts the viewer to the subject as four white US Marshals escort a female African-American child presumably on her way to school. The background concrete wall is graffitied with racial slurs and splattered with a crushed tomato giving a sense of immediacy and imminent violence to the scene. Although escorted, the girl disturbing appears alone in her struggle as the Marshall’s robotically repeated movements and cropped heads dehumanise them. The girl’s side profile places the viewer as encompassing the viewpoint of the white aggressors thereby implicating the spectator in the violence. The painting became central to the Civil Rights Movement.

Despite the fine art communities sometimes avid rejection of Rockwell as a mere illustrator, Rockwell’s social realist art has endured, affecting lives and impacting real change. His efforts were rewarded in 1977 when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Although he died tragically a year later, his legacy continues to influence artists to this day. 

Bibliography

‘Norman Rockwell: A Brief Biography’, Norman Rockwell Museum. Accessed February 2, 2020. https://www.nrm.org/about/about-2/about-norman-rockwell/.

‘Norman Rockwell’, The Art Story. Accessed February 2, 2020. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/rockwell-norman/life-and-legacy/#biography_header.