American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (3 page)

He liked jokes less than he liked humorous stories, but he was not joke averse. In January 1955 he jotted down a joke he had heard and sent it to his wife’s therapist, Dr. Robert P. Knight. Here it is: A man flies back from an African safari for the express purpose of asking his psychiatrist two questions. The psychiatrist scoffs at his abruptness, but allows the man to pose the two questions.

The man asks, “Is it possible for a man to fall in love with an elephant?” The psychiatrist assures him no, it is not possible.

Then the man asks: “Well, the second question is—Do you know anyone who want [
sic
] to buy a large engagement ring?”
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At the risk of overinterpretation, you can read the joke as a story about a man in love with an overly large object. A joke about impossible love. It acknowledges that intense feelings can flourish outside of socially sanctioned relationships, in the wilderness of the self. Recently, I came across a reference in a newspaper story to “the kind of family tranquility Norman Rockwell depicted in his paintings.” It is one of the many fallacies surrounding his art. Rockwell was not, in any sense, a painter of families. To the contrary, his work demonstrates how easy it is to opt out of the model nuclear family and find pleasure in alternate attachments.

Of Rockwell’s 323 covers for
The Saturday Evening Post
, only three portray a conventional family of parents and two or more children (
Coming and Going
, of 1947;
Walking to Church
, of 1953; and
Easter Morning
, of 1959). Not a single cover shows a mother alone with a daughter or a son. There are no fathers providing advice to daughters. Instead, Rockwell culled the majority of his figures from an imaginary assembly of boys and fathers and grandfathers who convene in places where women seldom intrude.

Boyishness is presented in his work as a desirable quality, even in girls. Rockwell’s female figures tend to break from traditional gender roles and assume masculine guises. Typically, a redheaded girl with a black eye sits in the hall outside the principal’s office, grinning despite the reprimand awaiting her.

It is not a coincidence that Rockwell kept returning to the world of boyhood in his art. As a child, he had to play second fiddle to his older brother, Jarvis, a boy’s boy, an athlete with fearsome confidence. Norman, by contrast, was a ninety-nine-pound weakling, forever disappointed with his body and given to resentment. Growing up in an era when boys were still judged largely by their body type and prowess at sports, he felt, as he once wrote, like “a lump, a long, skinny nothing, a bean pole without the beans.”
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Rockwell wrote out this joke about an elephant and gave it to a psychiatrist.

He was always seeking, it seemed, the protecting wing of a brother. Even after he became famous, he required the nearly constant companionship of men whom he perceived as physically strong. He sought out friends who went fishing in the wilderness and trekked up mountains, men with mud on their shoes, daredevils who were not prim and careful the way he was. Although he married three times and raised a family, he acknowledged that he didn’t pine for women. They made him feel imperiled. He was a man of extreme dependencies and complicated proclivities. He was given to affections that do not fit any known label, and his life was not made any easier by having been lived in an era when a man was expected to share his life with what used to be called a “swell girl.”

*   *   *

What’s interesting is how Rockwell’s personal desire for inclusion and normalcy spoke to the national desire for inclusion and normalcy. In the early twentieth century, immigrants pouring into this country were eager to become American citizens and assume the trappings of national identity. But what does an American look like? On the surface, there was little to connect the farmer roping a cow in Oklahoma to the Polish-Jewish tailor eking out a living in the Bronx to the Spanish-speaking bodega owner in California. Unlike most other countries, America was made up of hundreds of ethnic and local subcultures. Because it lacked homogenous, universally shared traditions, it had to invent some. So it came up with Thanksgiving, baseball—and Norman Rockwell.

When Rockwell published his first cover for
The Saturday Evening Post
, in 1916, there was no radio, television, or Internet, and the
Post
was the national frame of reference. As the the largest-circulation magazine in the country, it helped spawn a new kind of culture: mass culture. Millions of Americans who loved Rockwell’s work never saw an original painting of his. Instead, they sat at their kitchen tables poring over the latest issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
and “reading” his images, a number of which, by the way, portrayed people who themselves were engaged in the act of reading or trying to decipher messages on paper. For instance, a boy studies a lunch bill in a railroad dining car, trying to calculate the tip. Two cleaning women lean into each other in an empty theater, reading a
Playbill
that someone better-off left behind. A handsome, long-limbed grocery clerk spends his lunch break engrossed in a law book as the face of Abraham Lincoln (a former grocer) hovers beneficently from two tacked-up photographs on the wall behind him.

Where do all these scenes take place? Nowhere you could drive to. Nowhere on a map. Rather, Rockwell Land is its own universe, freestanding and totally distinct. It can put you in mind of the invented terrain of Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
(which is set in the made-up town of Grover’s Corners in New Hampshire), or Frank Capra’s film
It’s a Wonderful Life
(which is set in made-up Bedford Falls in upstate New York). Although Rockwell’s paintings are presumed to portray smallish towns in New England, he rarely clues you in on the location, in part because
The Saturday Evening Post
was trying to appeal to readers across the country. Rockwell invented the small town that is located nowhere in particular. The small town that is large enough to encompass the entire population of the United States.

The title of this book,
American Mirror
, is not meant to suggest that Rockwell held a mirror up to American life and painted a literal, mimetic version of it. Rather, his work mirrors his own temperament—his sense of humor, his fear of depths—and struck Americans as a truer version of themselves than the sallow, solemn, hard-bitten Puritans they knew from eighteenth-century portraits. When you gaze into a mirror, the writer Anne Hollander notes, you are imagining rather than seeing. Mirrors, she writes, are a means “for creating satisfactory artistic fictions.”
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Interestingly, at least a dozen of Rockwell’s paintings feature people studying their faces in mirrors, including his famous
Triple Self-Portrait
(frontispiece), which captures the comedy of trying to capture yourself.

Did Rockwell have his limitations? Of course. As his critics are quick to point out, he turned his back on modernism and remained a happiness maximizer. Where, in his work, are disease and death? Where is his sense of existential dread? I would argue that angst is probably overrepresented in modern art. Surely we can make room for an artist who was more interested in running toward the light. Unlike his fellow realist Edward Hopper, whose work abounds with the long shadows of late afternoon, Rockwell prefers the light of morning; his work can put you in mind of that sunny, hopeful moment right before lunch.

Though ridiculed by art critics and literary critics for much of his life, Rockwell commanded respect among painters and sculptors across the stylistic spectrum. Willem de Kooning openly expressed his adulation for him. Andy Warhol bought two of his paintings. Much about Rockwell’s approach to art—the storytelling, the jokiness, the staged scenes and costumes, the reliance on photography—is standard practice among artists today. You cannot make a modern artist out of Rockwell. But you can make a postmodern artist out of him; he shares with the current generation a historically self-conscious approach to picture making.

In interviews, Rockwell always declined to describe himself as an artist of any sort. When asked, he would invariably demur, insisting he was an illustrator. You can see the comment as a display of humility or you can see it as a defensive feint (he couldn’t be rejected by the art world if he rejected it first). But I think he meant the claim literally. While many twentieth-century illustrators thought of commercial art as something you did to support a second, little-paying career as a fine artist, Rockwell didn’t have a separate career as a fine artist. He only had the commercial part, the illustrations for magazines and calendars and advertisements. He didn’t make pictures to show in galleries or to sell to collectors. When he parted with one of his paintings, it was often as a gift to a friend or neighbor.

Surely he would be incredulous at the prices his pictures go for these days. In 2002, burnished by its appearance in the Guggenheim show,
Rosie the Riveter
was sold at Sotheby’s for $4.9 million. In 2006
Breaking Home Ties
was auctioned off for three times as much, $15.4 million, which remains the record price for a Rockwell. (Prices from private sales might be higher, but are never disclosed.) One mentions this reluctantly, for prices mislead. Prices are merely decorative stickers attached to works of art, not an expression of their essence. High prices indicate that an object is fashionable, that collectors clutch at it, whether brilliantly or blindly.

By now, it seems a bit redundant to ask whether Rockwell’s pictures are art. Most of us no longer believe that an invisible red velvet rope separates museum art from illustration. No one could reasonably argue that every abstract painting in a museum collection is aesthetically superior to Rockwell’s illustrations, as if illustration were a lower, unevolved life form without the intelligence of the more prestigious mediums.

The truth is that every genre produces its share of marvels and masterpieces, works that endure from one generation to the next, inviting attempts at explication and defeating them in short order. Rockwell’s work has manifested far more staying power than that of countless abstract painters who were hailed in his lifetime, and one suspects it is here for the ages.

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THE BIRD MAN OF YONKERS

(1830 TO 1888)

For every Rembrandt, for every artist whose work shines across the divide of centuries, there are thousands of artists whose names have been forgotten. Their work remains invisible to us, shuttered away in moldering basements and junk shops where no one has bothered to dust it off and look at it for decades. It’s not a tragedy. It’s simply the law of the art jungle: lesser artists fall into obscurity over time. And then there’s even a lower category, those who never had the good fortune to climb to a respectable professional height from which to plummet.

Such an artist was Howard Hill, who endured most every disappointment that can attend the artistic life. Today, you won’t find his paintings in any museums and he isn’t mentioned in any books on American art. This is not entirely unjust. An intense, wounded man with a drinking problem, he was too overwhelmed by the demands of daily living to sustain the discipline needed for art. He died a pauper in 1888 and is buried in Yonkers, New York, in an an unmarked grave.

Hill was Norman Rockwell’s maternal grandfather; he died six years before Rockwell was born. Yet, an absence can be more vivid than a presence, and Hill would exert a large influence on his grandson. As Rockwell grew up, he had ample opportunity to look at any number of Hill’s paintings that were hanging in his home or in those of his relatives, and to hear his mother recall the flamboyant life that had produced them.

Born in London in 1830, Hill spent most of his career as an artist-émigré in Yonkers, New York, painting pictures of animals. Not elegant English animals, like the queen’s spaniels or the glossy-haired horses of George Stubbs. Rather, he was fascinated by barnyard birds of the scruffiest sort: ducks and grouses and quail, even roosters and chickens. He might portray a mother quail with a covey of little chicks standing in tall grass, at the edge of the woods, a meadow and sky unfurling in the distance. Bird painting, let’s call it, occupied its own tiny niche in the market for landscapes that had been opened up by the painters of the Hudson River School, which, of course, was not a school but the first-ever bona fide art movement in America.

Was Hill a neglected master? Hardly. Rockwell, for one, referred to his pictures as “pot-boilers.” But as a child who was gifted at drawing and uncommonly observant, he took note of certain similarities between his work and that of his grandfather. Hill, he saw, drew with care and loaded up his pictures with minute detail. Perhaps Rockwell had inherited Hill’s precisionist way with a pencil or perhaps he had consciously appropriated it. “I’m sure all the detail in my grandfather’s pictures had something to do with the way I’ve always painted,” he once noted. “Right from the beginning I always strived to capture everything I saw as completely as possible.”
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