American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (8 page)

Among his classmates, he quickly became known as an exceptional draftsman if a somewhat awkward presence. At this point, he had curly hair and was so gangly he appeared to be taller than he was (he stood just under five foot eleven). He concentrated on his work with a single-mindedness that earned him the nickname “The Deacon.” Women were among the students at the League, but he was not friendly with any one in particular. By his own admission, he was surprised by the work habits of his fellow students, so many of whom seemed capricious, even reckless, working when the whim took them, even in the middle of the night. Rockwell, by contrast, would never work through the night. And he would never miss lunch.

He was aware he was different from the other students, perhaps more ambitious, or just more inhibited, and he felt excluded from the camaraderie of school life. The third-floor lunchroom was the League hangout and, throughout the day, students and teachers along with art-class models who had tossed on bathrobes conversed over coffee and cigarettes. Once, Rockwell was taken aback when a stylish art student with longish hair visible beneath a wide-rimmed hat, accosted him in the lunchroom and remarked unkindly, “You know, if I worked as hard as you, I could be as good as Velasquez.” Rockwell replied, “So, why don’t you?”
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In truth, he was bothered by his punch-the-clock work habits and wondered if his regular hours suggested some flaw in his nature. He once read somewhere that Sir John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, had swooned when he first saw the
Mona Lisa
. Rockwell later joked that he would go up to the Metropolitan Museum, stand in front of a Rembrandt he loved and order himself, “Swoon, damn you, swoon.”
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*   *   *

The League offered two courses in “Illustration and Composition” and, on his first day of school, Rockwell signed up for both of them.
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But the nuts and bolts of illustration turned out to be less compelling than he had anticipated. A few weeks later, he dropped Ernest Blumenschein’s illustration course and signed up instead for “Life Drawing for Men,” which was taught by George Bridgman, the most celebrated teacher at the League, and certainly the one who was to have the largest influence on Rockwell.

Bridgman was then in his forties, a short, stocky, cigar-smoking aesthete who swore liberally. His class met every afternoon, from 1:00 to 4:30, and was limited to male students; women had their own life-drawing class, in order to be spared the impropriety of viewing an unclothed model in mixed company. The classes always began on time and Rockwell was predictably punctual, rushing to retrieve his supplies—his charcoal and scrapers and Michalat drawing paper—from his locker and then joining his classmates as they took their places on hardwood chairs arrayed in three long rows in front of the model, who was elevated on a platform. Rockwell, like the other men in the class, showed up in a button-down white shirt and a vest, no smock.

The mood in Bridgman’s class was hardly relaxed. Too many young men, sometimes as many as forty, were crowded into the airless studio, all of them sketching the same model. Every Friday afternoon, Bridgman ranked the students and their drawings; each young man desperately wanted to be number one, to be confirmed in his belief that art was his obvious destiny. Each student sought to produce what his teacher called, with more than a little vanity, a “Number 1 Bridgman drawing,” as if that represented a new plateau of human achievement.

In reality, a Bridgman drawing was pretty much like the standard academic drawing of that era, or really of any era. For centuries, figure drawing had been the foundation of art education and its fundamentals were essentially the same. Bridgman, as much as Thomas Eakins in the nineteenth century or Leonardo in the sixteenth, approached the human body as a feat of engineering, stressing its mechanics and basic dynamics instead of surface modeling. For students, the goal was to capture not merely the curve of a torso or a thigh, but to understand the muscles and bones that lay beneath it and gave the body its shape, to become acquainted with the tibia and the ulna and the femur and the humerus—a roster of Latinate words that had to be memorized. Bridgman wrote many manuals for artists, one of which was devoted exclusively to the human hand.

From one week to the next, Rockwell was able to produce a Number 1 Bridgman drawing—a technically polished, if emotionally void, figure study, one whose separate elements he had painstakingly executed over four or five days at a specified rate of progress. Even so, Rockwell was a nervous artist. His success at drawing never struck him as guaranteed. Each new figure study posed its own risk, opened up the possibility of getting everything wrong.

Besides, Bridgman was as tough with him as with anyone else. The teacher didn’t hesitate to correct directly on the students’ work, redrawing an awkwardly pitched shoulder or a badly proportioned leg. Once Rockwell showed him what appeared to be an adequate study, only to hear: “You haven’t got the main line of action. Look here. Down through the hip.” And then the teacher demonstrated, drawing a heavy black line down the middle of the figure. Rockwell spent the next day trying to erase Bridgman’s corrections so his parents wouldn’t think he was failing at school.

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Over the years, many artists have described their astonishment at first sketching a female nude, the rush of pleasure and embarrassment, the intense awkwardness pervading the studio as a group of young men shyly looked and lost their visual virginity en masse, their cheeks blushing, their hands trembling. Inevitably, they botched their first drawings. (“His face was redder than it had ever been before in his life,” the artist Guy Pène du Bois wrote of himself in the third person.
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)

Rockwell, however, treated the subject with curious remove. He later claimed that he and his classmates were so engrossed by the demands of drawing that “we just didn’t think of the model as a woman.” The comment might sound like a prudish feint, so much defensive posturing. But Rockwell probably spoke with some truth, if not for his classmates, then for himself. He found it more interesting to draw a model named Antonio Corsi, who was known to have posed for Sargent and Whistler. (“His dark-skinned body was lithe, strong, and supple—wonderful to draw,” Rockwell recalled.
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) Tense as he was about the female body, he was less guarded about acknowledging the beauty of the male body.

George Bridgman’s drawing class at the Art Students League in the fall of 1912
(Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York)

In the end, what Rockwell took away from Bridgman probably had less to do with the human figure and the bones running through it than the romance of his chosen field. Bridgman, the least snobby of aesthetes, revered the heroes of the Golden Age of Illustration. After class was over, he would linger and talk to a few students and never seemed to be in a rush to ride the train home up to Pelham. He would reminisce about Howard Pyle and Edwin Austin Abbey while sipping on a beer and sketching distractedly on a scrap of paper.

Rockwell wanted to believe that illustration was a noble calling. And in Bridgman’s company he did believe it, believed that illustrators were the equal of fine artists. True, they committed the mercenary sin of earning money. But they did something socially valuable and uplifting; they recorded scenes from American history and literary classics. But the Golden Age of Illustration of which they aspired to be part was already nearing extinction. An entire generation seemed to disappear while Rockwell was in school. Frederic Remington, who had immortalized the Wild West in his magazine illustrations, died in 1909 in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Winslow Homer, an undisputed master who had begun his career as a painter-journalist covering the Civil War for
Harper’s Weekly
, died in his studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, in 1910. John La Farge wrote an obituary for Homer and expired six weeks later in Newport, Rhode Island. The following summer, Edwin Austin Abbey, a native Philadelphian known for his elegant line drawings of scenes culled from Shakespeare, troubadours and the stage, died in London.

But the death that registered the most sharply at the League was surely that of Howard Pyle—Rockwell’s personal favorite. On November 9, 1911, just a month after Rockwell started school, Pyle died suddenly at the age of fifty-eight from a kidney infection. He had been living in a villa outside of Florence, studying mural painting, haunted by a sense that a lifetime’s worth of illustration was not enough to guarantee his place as an artist.

It wasn’t just the loss of prodigiously gifted artists that was draining illustration of its early luster. It was also the rise of advertising. What had begun in America in the late nineteenth century as a cerebral populism—beautiful illustrations in books and literary magazines made possible by advances in photomechanical reproduction—by now had devolved into an exercise in hard-sell consumerism. Magazines were growing thick with advertisements for bicycles and upright pianos, for Knox Gelatine and Pears’ soap. Illustrators who had dreamed in their youth of providing elegant etchings for books by Dickens or Shakespeare instead found themselves trying to draw a Swift’s Premium Ham and persuade the public of its tastiness.

As a student, Rockwell resolved to avoid the coarser outskirts of his field. “In art school,” he noted, “the illustration class was just as highly respected as the portrait or landscape classes. Art Young, Charley Kuntz, and I signed our names in blood, swearing never to prostitute our art, never to do advertising jobs, never to make more than fifty dollars a week.”
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He was referring to his illustration class with Thomas Fogarty, which met on weekdays from 8:30 to 12:30. Fogarty was the opposite of Bridgman—neat, tiny, nervous and literal minded, a professional illustrator, the son of Irish immigrants.
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He pointed his students straight to the marketplace. His own pen-and-ink illustrations appeared regularly in books published by Doubleday, Page and other leading houses, and he generously shared his contacts with his students, encouraging them to search out assignments for themselves and start building relationships with art editors and book publishers.

In class, he trumpeted one message: pictures are the servants of text. He gave his students hypothetical magazine assignments. They read short stories and poetry and picked out lines or verses to illustrate, preferably ones that exuded a bit of drama, that portrayed characters who might be dueling or reveling or sobbing into a handkerchief. The drawings would be judged and graded as much for their artistry as for their fidelity to the text. The goal was to italicize the narrative, to banish vagueness from the words and bring characters into sharp relief.

All in all, Rockwell’s first year at the League was an indisputable success. In May 1912 the school held a big exhibition and gave out prizes. Rockwell won the Thomas Fogarty Illustration Class Award, and his name was mentioned in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
and
The New York Times.
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His winning submission was an illustration for “The Deserted Village,” the eighteenth-century pastoral poem by Oliver Goldsmith. It remains Rockwell’s earliest known surviving work. The Art Students League kept it for its own modest collection when it awarded him the prize, and thus it was spared the fate of innumerable early Rockwells that were lost or destroyed over time.

This charcoal drawing remains Rockwell’s earliest known work. He intended it as an illustration of a scene in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village.”
(Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York)

Rockwell was seventeen years old when he made the drawing, and it is a marvel of precocious draftsmanship. It takes you into a small, tenebrous, candlelit room where a sick boy lies supine in bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin, the contours of his body visible through the fabric. A village preacher, shown from the back in his long coat and white wig, kneels at the boy’s side. A grandfather clock looms dramatically in the center of the composition, infusing the scene with a time-is-ticking ominousness; a chair in the right foreground invites you to linger and look. Perhaps taking a cue from Rembrandt, Rockwell is able to extract great pictorial drama from the play of candlelight on the back wall of the room, a glimpse of radiance in the unreachable distance.