American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (64 page)

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On October 1, after returning with Molly from a last-minute vacation in England and Portugal, Rockwell went down to New York to appear as a guest on
The Tonight Show.
It was Johnny Carson’s sixth anniversary as host and Rockwell had been commissioned to paint a portrait of him and deliver it on-air as a surprise. The kind of surprise that is scripted down to the last arched eyebrow. Although a tape of the show seems not to exist, one suspects that Rockwell held his own beside his fellow guest, John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, a fixture on the Carson show who somehow maintained his glamorous demeanor as his city slid into financial trouble and became the subject of comedians’ jokes about piled-up trash on the sidewalks.
6

The following week, Rockwell was in New York again for a day of tightly scheduled appointments. He saw Danenberg at the gallery, Allen Hurlbert at
Look
, and had a portrait session with two acclaimed rock stars: Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield, who hoped to use his work on the cover of their next album. As Kooper recalled in his memoir, “All of a sudden it hit me. Let’s get Norman Rockwell to paint a portrait of me and Michael. Is that fucking beautiful or what?”
7

Kooper, a singer and organist for two rock groups—the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, as well as a legendary studio musician who contributed to work by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones—was then teamed up with the guitarist Michael Bloomfield, recording a series of blues jam sessions. Rockwell agreed to do the cover for their second album,
The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper
, one of the seminal albums of the sixties.

The portrait session was held in a photography studio at Columbia Records, in midtown Manhattan. Kooper and Bloomfield were excited to meet Rockwell. Bloomfield, who had flown in from San Francisco and was not averse to popping pills, talked a blue streak. He kept saying that Rockwell
must
, just
must
, come out to Haight-Ashbury and paint the people there. “He couldn’t really shut up,”
8
Kooper recalled years later. “It must have been speed or something.

“Norman was able to deal with any situation,” Kooper continued. “This was the time of hippies. I thought he fit in quite well with that. He was very calm and nothing fazed him. He photographed us and then off he went.”
9
A week later, Kooper was surprised when he took in the mail and found an invitation to a Rockwell exhibition that was opening soon at a gallery on Madison Avenue.

*   *   *

The show at the Danenberg gallery opened on October 21, and stayed up for three weeks. People strolling along Madison Avenue in the cool autumn air could see
Saying Grace
, with its grandmother and little blond boy praying in a railroad-station luncheonette, displayed in the gallery’s big front window. In other words, a painting of a restaurant storefront visible in a Madison Avenue storefront. Glass upon glass. A reminder of Rockwell’s thematic complexity, an image of boyhood innocence beckoning from the unreachable space behind the glass wall.

An opening reception was held, a six-to-eight-o’clock affair attended by a throng of illustration people and advertising people. Moët & Chandon had offered to donate champagne for the occasion in exchange for permission to photograph Rockwell sipping on a flute of it, for use in an advertising campaign. Danenberg agreed without consulting Rockwell and a shipment of boxes arrived in short order. (“I had champagne for seven years,” Danenberg recalled gleefully.
10
) Dressed in his customary tweedy jacket, with a plaid bow tie, Rockwell arrived at the reception half an hour late and, by most accounts, felt embarrassed by the fuss.

Al Kooper, Norman Rockwell, and Mike Bloomfield
(Photograph by Bob Cato; courtesy of Al Kooper)

Among the visitors was Al Kooper and his musician-wife, both of them in flamboyant rock-star clothes. They knew no one and made their way around the perimeter of the room, pausing to look at each painting and drawing. “My favorite thing was his painting of Bertrand Russell,”
11
Kooper recalled later. “He looked like a chicken. It killed me. That was the high point of my night.”

When Rockwell spotted Kooper, he pulled him aside and led him to a small office in the back of the gallery. “I don’t really like these things,” Rockwell confided, lowering his voice. “So I think I am going to stay here as much as I can. But I wanted to see you and apologize and say that I am very close to finishing”—finishing his much-delayed album cover, that is.

*   *   *

The show received a friendly enough mention in Grace Glueck’s Friday Art Notes column in
The New York Times
. “Mad Avenue’s least Minimal show is—brace yourself—a Norman Rockwell retrospective,” she noted. “Some 50 rich, ripe, hand-painted oils by the folksy SatEvePost color illustrator are packing them in.”
12
Rockwell spoke to her by phone and she got some good quotations out of him. “I’m overcome,” he told Glueck. “It’s the first real show I’ve ever had in New York. I’ve always wistfully thumbed through art magazines, hoping that even one critic would use me as a whipping boy. But no.”

In the end, he was not to have his desires fulfilled. The show was ignored by most art critics, except for a lone reviewer at
Arts Magazine
, who was complimentary. Rockwell promptly sent him a thank-you note. Thomas S. Buechner (pronounced BEAK-ner), the young director of the Brooklyn Museum and a figurative painter himself, wrote a lovely “review” that appeared in
The New York Times
.
13
The article was in fact an advertisement. “I paid for it,” Danenberg confessed later.

The paper’s art critics, in the meantime, remained silent. Rockwell had long been demonized as an entertainer rather than an artist, and neither Hilton Kramer nor John Canaday was willing to dignify his efforts by writing even a thoughtful dismissal. They believed they had to save their time for ennobling encounters with high art. Yet the divide between middlebrow art and high art was never as wide as certain people pretended and Rockwell’s work made a strong impression on countless artists who visited the show and found themselves surprised. Here was one more woefully misunderstood artist.

Willem de Kooning, who was then his midsixties and acclaimed as the country’s leading abstract painter, dropped by the show unannounced. Danenberg, who was there to greet him, recalled that he especially admired Rockwell’s
Connoisseur
, the one in which an elderly gentleman contemplates a Pollock drip painting. Rockwell had gone to great lengths to replicate the precise chaos of a Pollock canvas and de Kooning noticed. “Square inch by square inch,” he announced in his accented English, “it’s better than Jackson!”
14
Hard to know if the comment was intended to elevate Rockwell or demote Pollock.

Warhol also came in to see the show. “He was fascinated,” Danenberg later recalled. “He said that Rockwell was a precursor of the hyper-realists.”
15

In the next few years, Warhol purchased two works by Rockwell for his private collection. The first was a smallish portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, from 1963, in which the first lady is a sweet- if somewhat vacant-looking figure with wide-set doe eyes and bouffant hair, a strand of pearls around her neck.
16
Warhol also bought a print by Rockwell,
Extra Good Boys and Girls
,
17
in which a red-clad Santa sits on a ladder, plotting his Christmas Eve route on a world map unfurled on the wall behind him. Santa, like Jackie, was known by his first name and no doubt qualified in Warhol’s star-struck brain as a major celebrity.

Rockwell’s art, compared to that of the Pop artists, was not only accessible but actually popular. The Pop artists had admired it to varying degrees since they were kids. In interviews, they cited Rockwell and
The Saturday Evening Post
as an important influence on their work, as did many other artists who first saw Rockwell’s work in the magazines to which their parents subscribed.

What’s interesting is that by 1968 Rockwell was suddenly in line with a younger generation whose work shared and thus validated his interest not only in realism, but in crisp edges and photographic precision. Much of the new work stood at an opposite pole from the undulating skeins of dripped paint and blazing stimuli of Pollock, whose imagery evoked something cosmic and flowing (the night sky, the beginning of the world), as well as hidden interiors—jangling nerve fibers, axons and dendrites, pure emotion. “We are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings,” Barnett Newman, the talkiest of the Abstract Expressionists, once said.
18

Rockwell, by contrast, was always latching onto the legible world, onto disparate objects, each one distinct from the next. The same held true of the Photo-Realists, who emerged circa 1968 as a subset of Pop and whose methods were uncannily similar to those of Rockwell. They, too, had darkrooms built into their studios and made photographs an essential part of their painting process, variously copying them by hand or using (as Rockwell did) a Balopticon to enlarge and project them.

To be sure, many European masters—Manet, Degas, Vermeer, and Canaletto—had used cameras and camera obscuras as painting aids, but the Photo-Realists were probably the first group of painters to publicly admit it, to out the camera in art history. “Everyone had used cameras and denied it,” notes Richard Estes, an early Photo-Realist known for capturing fleeting reflections in the glass and metal surfaces of the city. “I own up to it. I consider my camera a sketchbook. I think that with Rockwell, it’s the same way.”
19

Audrey Flack, another pioneering Photo-Realist, then exhibited with French & Co., which was located in the building adjacent to the Danenberg gallery. She had never given much thought to Rockwell but wandered next door to see the show. “I loved it,”
20
she said years later. “I thought Rockwell was a terrific painter. You know, Andy Warhol is not a good painter. He is a graphic artist, a designer.” Indeed, Rockwell drew with a fierce concision that harked back to the academic tradition of anatomical correctness, whereas Warhol seized on the basic strategy of graphic design, subordinating drawing to the demands of the quick visual punch.

Put another way, Warhol used the techniques of commercial art to make high art, whereas Rockwell used the techniques of high art to make commercial art.

Of the four dozen paintings in Rockwell’s gallery show, the majority were not for sale. Rockwell had no interest in parting with the ones he owned, in part because Molly had been talking about starting a museum in Stockbridge. A few paintings did get away, at prices that today seem indecently low.
The Problem We All Live With
was sold for $15,000, to Jack Solomon, who owned the Circle Gallery; he also purchased
The Russian Schoolroom
for $8,000.
21
Larry Casper, the codirector of the Danenberg gallery, bought
Night Watchmaker
for $6,000. At the time, works by first-tier American realists such as Edward Hopper or George Bellows were selling for ten times that much.

Arthur Teichmann, who was better known as Arthur Murray and had retired from teaching ballroom dancing a few years earlier, saw the show and tried to buy a painting for his wife. There was one he wanted desperately:
Girl at Mirror
, for which he offered $15,000, but Rockwell declined to sell.
22

*   *   *

Two Tuesdays after the opening of his exhibition, Election Day arrived. Rockwell was assigned to paint a portrait of the new president for
Look
magazine. He had expected to be painting Hubert Humphrey and remained incredulous that Richard Nixon had won. Rockwell’s editors at
Look
, despite their generally liberal leanings, were exhorting him to be kind to the president, if only to help them cultivate sources in the new Republican administration. As Rockwell explained, “
Look
said, ‘We want to have a relationship with the White House, so you better do him looking at his best.’ So boy I fixed him up.”
23

Rockwell had painted Nixon three times since 1957 and his previous encounter with him—a portrait session at the Plaza Hotel during the 1968 campaign—had been tense.
24
He lost patience when Nixon paused in the hotel hallway to chat up two cleaning women and invite them to visit him at the White House should he win the election. Standing in the carpeted hallway, watching Nixon awkwardly ingratiate himself with the maids, Rockwell thought about the thin line separating a charming gesture from a phony one.

Now, on November 14, Rockwell was driven to New York for a portrait session scheduled for the next day. He had been instructed to meet the president-elect at the Pierre Hotel, in a suite that served as the Nixon transition headquarters. Rockwell never did get in to see him. He waited fruitlessly on the thirty-ninth floor as Nixon remained tied up in a series of meetings until emerging at the end of the day, a Friday, to fly off to his place in Key Biscayne for the weekend. This is not to suggest that Rockwell was the object of a presidential snub. Nixon declined to pose for any portraitist during his presidency.