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Future Exhibitions Past Exhibitions Back to Exhibitions |
 Norman Rockwell brochure essay American Life and Storytelling: The Art of Norman Rockwell June 27–September 1 The Images for Mass Media Norman Rockwell's art is familiar to millions of people. His images can be seen everywhere; they are easily recognized and understood. Whether we look at his paintings of wholesome scenes or those depicting more critical views on racism and other social issues, we see in his images the indelible fragments of our nation's experience. Indeed, to three generations of Americans living in the 20th (and now the 21st) century, Rockwell's images of events and scenes from everyday life have become nostalgic icons of our recent past. As such, his art enjoys the status of being a highly visible component of popular culture in contemporary America. Many of Rockwell's images are as recognizable as, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Grant Wood's American Gothic. Who has not seen the famous images of Rockwell's Four Freedoms (1943)—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear—expressing the fundamental political values of our society? In fact, in the past months, Freedom of Fear—the image of a father standing over sleeping children—has appeared in The New York Times with the headline of the folded newspaper in the father's hand appropriately changed to reflect the aftermath of the tragedies of September 11, 2001. On a lighter note, there is Rockwell's scene of a large family gathered around a roasted turkey at Thanksgiving. Taken from his work Freedom from Want, this image has been integrated many times into works by other artists, as well as into advertisements and memorable scenes from television programs and movies. Just recently it was used in Disney's animated film, Lilo and Stitch, with the figures in the original all changed appropriately to the animation characters. And then there are literally hundreds of now familiar images that illustrated the covers of the Saturday Evening Post in the first half of the last century. These magazine covers vividly show not only the impact of the then-expanding mass media, but also Rockwell's role on the cusp of mass cultural productions, contributing to the media the new visual language of 20th century popular culture. This is one reason why Rockwell's art is so highly visible to us. The Images We Understand Another reason for Rockwell's popularity is that his images are easy to understand. Who could be perplexed by his Homecoming, in which the returning boy scout is greeted by his proud father, and his mother and other family members (dogs and cat included) are seen rushing down the stairs with wide smile across their face? In another example from the exhibition, there is no ambiguity in the painting titled The Oculist, in which a scene of thwarted confrontation is depicted. The older optician smiling broadly is obliviously ignoring the frustration and impatience of a young boy who clearly wants to go play baseball and would prefer to have nothing to do with fitting his glasses. As these examples demonstrate, Rockwell's art is a form of realistic or naturalistic storytelling. And the story is almost always familiar to us, something that comes straight from our own daily lives. Perhaps it is as simple as Rockwell's own personal way of approaching his life and work. In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he lived for many years until his death in 1978, Rockwell was very much a part of his community, and he used his friends, neighbors and the local shop owners for his models. The Power to Evoke Our Own Experience However, if Rockwell were simply a chronicler of everyday life in the 20th century—say, a mere illustrator of stories that we already knew—he would not be recognized as an individual artist or even an illustrator. He would be lost in the sea of images, some eye-catching but mostly anonymous, which were churned out by the mass media during his lifetime. But there was more to the beloved Norman Rockwell than the outward familiarity of his images—images that were easy to comprehend (most of the time) and reminiscent of everyday scenes. It was his genius as an artist that guaranteed Rockwell's popularity. His images succeeded—and still succeed—in evoking in us our own memories of those cherished moments from our everyday lives. Often the surface of his original paintings is a product of meticulous artistic control to reproduce the real with photographic detail. We do not necessarily perceive the tactile quality and the depth that we are accustomed to finding in good paintings. In this sense the subscribers of the Post, who waited with anticipation for succeeding installments of Rockwell's illustrated covers, did not really miss anything by not seeing the original oils that he painted for the magazine. Often, it was the perfectly reproducible image laden with a story that was significant in the final instance. His artistic genius was in his ability to produce for the media and ultimately for us the powerfully evocative images in our own memory. When we look at his work, we are in effect seeing images of our own experience—mine slightly different from yours, perhaps, but nevertheless made meaningful as a common experience by his. Rockwell's images reach deep inside us to evoke our individual memories and transform them into common memories of our nation. What is so powerful about Rockwell's art is its ability to provide us with nostalgic icons of our shared identity. In his carefully staged composition of scenes from everyday life—or, from subjects taken from historical sources, for that matter—we are not necessarily seeing reality meticulously reproduced, but a view of what ought to be, a view that we reference in order to organize and understand what our fragments of experience should mean in our own memory. And to the extent Rockwell "mythologized" reality (he often consciously tried to depict good things about our life), his art resonated with the wholesome and good nature that we possess. We cannot emphasize this enough in the aftermath of September 11. |
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