I spent an afternoon this week in Norman Rockwell’s America. I wasn’t at an auction, but inside an exhibit of his Saturday Evening Post magazine covers and some 3-D life-size sculptures of scenes from them.
The exhibit has been up for the last four months at the King of Prussia mall near where I live and will be ending this weekend. It’s a national touring exhibition of covers, illustrations, sculptures and paintings called “Rockwell’s America: Celebrating the Art of Norman Rockwell.” The tour began in 2004 in Nashville, TN.
It’s a wonderful presentation that celebrates and educates about one of this country’s best and well-known illustrators – who was actually a storyteller. Look at any of his works; you can draw his story from it or create your own.
“I paint life as I would like it to be,” intoned Rockwell in a quote on a wall at the exhibit. And that he did.
Rockwell’s is an idealized and homogenized view of America – suburban neat, not urban gritty. Where little white boys sneaked a dip in forbidden swimming holes, where an old man sat snoozing in a fishing boat with his dog, where a country cop hid behind a fence to catch city slickers driving too fast.
I learned a few things myself about the man:
He scoured antique shops and auction houses – a soul-mate? – for props for his illustrations.
He always sent his illustrations framed to his editor, even if the canvas was still wet. Rockwell felt that a piece was not completed until it was framed. He’d been doing that since a student of illustrator Thomas Fogarty who told him to “step over the frame, Norman, over the frame and live in the picture.”
He hired photographers to take pictures of his subjects, and he chose the props and costumes.
His studio burned down in 1943 after a smoldering ash from his trademark pipe ignited in a trash can overnight.
The following steps were on a wall at the exhibit. I’m not sure if Rockwell ever did either, but I found them amusing:
This is how to get a chicken to stand still: Pick it up, rock it back and forth a few times and release it. It’ll stand still for 5 minutes.
This is how to get children to stand still: Pay them 50 cents.
As I meandered through the exhibit, I searched for signs of black life in Rockwell’s world. I found very few; it was as if we lived on another planet. That’s the opposite of what I saw at an exhibit last year of works by another Post illustrator, a woman named Ellen Pyle. I was pleasantly surprised to see an illustration she created of a little black girl holding a turkey that was presented to Post editor George Lorimer in 1923. It was summarily rejected because he didn’t think his audience would tolerate a black person depicted as equal to a white person on the cover.
The first image of what looked like a black person in a Rockwell illustration at the exhibit was from July 9, 1949, called “Road Block.” It was a scene of a little dog blocking a truck. One of the truckers – who looked to be a black man – tried to coax the animal out of the truck’s path as neighbors – including a little black boy and girl with their backs to us in the foreground – watched and helped. Did he sneak them into the illustration?
The second image was near the end of the exhibit in the Tribute Gallery, framed covers of most of Rockwell’s illustrations. In the Dec. 7, 1946 cover called “New York Central Diner,” a black waiter smiled down at a little boy holding his change purse and looking at the menu, trying to figure out how much he could afford.
One of Rockwell’s most famous and iconic paintings came near the end of the exhibit: Ruby Bridges being escorted by white marshals to her first-grade class in an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in1960. The painting “The Problem We All Live With” was on the wall in all its brashness and defiance. It was the work of a new and enlightened Rockwell, who seemed to have cast off the idyllic world as he’d like it to be and drew one that was. His idealistic world was unraveling, smacked down by the civil rights movement and the reality of racism and prejudice.
The illustration appeared on the cover of Look magazine on Jan. 14, 1964.
I’ve stumbled onto Rockwell covers at auction before but still have not found the Ruby Bridges’ one. The most recent was from 1971 (he died in 1978), which contained an interview with Rockwell and a photo of him on the cover talking to a young newspaper hawker. I know Ruby is out there somewhere, and I’m sure I’ll eventually come across her.
The last room in the exhibit (just before the gallery of Post covers) led me back to Main Street-Christmas: Post holiday covers on the wall, cookies for Santa near the fireplace, a sculpture of a little boy trying to play a horn (image from a Post cover) and “It’s A Beautiful Life” playing on an old TV.
Vintage Rockwell. You can click here to see if the exhibition’s coming to your town.
