Happy birthday, Normie! (From The Writers Almanac) Its the birthday of the artist who said: I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. Thats Norman Rockwell, born in New York City (1894). He was an awkward, clumsy boy, with pigeon toes and bad eyesight even behind thick glasses. He did push-ups every morning, but remained skinny and weak. He had trouble reading and writing, too. He said: I could see I wasnt Gods gift to man in general, and the baseball coach in particular. A lump, a long skinny nothing, a bean pole without beans — that was what I was. Rockwell did show some talent as an artist. Teachers asked him to draw holiday illustrations on blackboards. He crafted cardboard reproductions of battleships for his older brother to play with. In the evenings, his father, a textile salesman, read aloud from Dickens; while he listened, Rockwell drew illustrations of the scenes. He started taking classes at an art school when he was 14 years old; two years later, he left high school to enroll as a full-time art student. His career took off quickly. He was hired by the magazine Boys Life as a cover illustrator and art editor, and he did freelance illustrations for other magazines. His dream was to be on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, the most popular magazine in America. So in 1916, he took a trip to Philadelphia to visit the Posts editor. The 22-year-old Rockwell was terrified and almost turned around, but he managed to make it into the office with two paintings and three sketches. The editor liked them so much that he purchased both paintings on the spot to use as covers, paying $75 for each — which Rockwell could hardly believe, since his salary at Boys Life had been $50 a month. The Post also asked the young man to turn the other sketches into cover paintings. Rockwell became a regular illustrator for the Post, eventually producing more than 300 covers in about 50 years. During World War II, Rockwell produced a series of four paintings based on the Four Freedoms identified by President Roosevelt: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Rockwell was living in Vermont, and instead of war images to illustrate the freedoms, he used his neighbors for models: a family gathered for Thanksgiving, a couple putting a child to bed, people praying together, and a man speaking out at a town hall meeting. Rockwell intended to offer the paintings as propaganda for the government, but when he visited the Office of War Information in Arlington, officials there refused to even look at Rockwells work. One official told him: The last war, you illustrators did the posters. This war, were going to use fine-arts men, real artists. So the four paintings were published as covers for the Post in February and March of 1943, and the public loved them. Realizing its mistake, the Office of War Information printed 2.5 million copies. Rockwell was 74 years old when he got a call from a New York City gallery that wanted to curate an exhibition of his paintings. Rockwells first response was to politely explain that the caller must have gotten him mixed up with an artist named Rockwell Kent. The show opened in October of 1968, and although it was pretty much ignored by art critics, artists like Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol came to admire it. One of Rockwells paintings showed a well-dressed, gray-haired man in a museum viewing a Jackson Pollock painting; de Kooning declared, Square inch by square inch, its better than Jackson! But despite occasional artists lauding his work, Rockwell was never taken seriously by critics. In 2001, more than 20 years after his death, Rockwell was exhibited in a New York museum for the first time when the Guggenheim launched a major retrospective.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 13:02:33 +0000
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