Norman Rockwell (3 page)

Institutions that extended their resources for
Norman Rockwell
include the following: American Illustrators Gallery; Art Students League (New York City); Austen Riggs; Bureau of Vital Statistics, Yonkers; Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church (New Rochelle, New York); Brooklyn Remembered; Coveleigh Club; Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington D.C.;
Esquire
magazine; Hudson River Museum; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Family History Center (Kensington, Maryland); Larchmont Yacht Club; Ledig House International Artists’ Colony; Special Collections at the Milbank Memorial Library, Teachers College, Columbia University; Hagley Art Museum; Houghton Special Library Collections, Harvard University; Institute for Living (Hartford, Connecticut); McLean Hospital; Mamaroneck Public Library; Mamaroneck Historical Society; Massachusetts State Police; Massena Public Library; Metropolitan New York Library Council, Hospital Library Services; Motor Vehicle Administration of Vermont; National Academy of Art (New York City); National Academy of Design (New York City); National Archives; New Rochelle Public Library; New-York Historical Society; New York Public Library (research librarians); New York Academy of Medicine, Historical Collections; Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles; Parrish Art Museum; Potsdam Public Museum;
The Saturday Evening Post
(Curtis Publishing archives); St. John’s Episcopal Church, Yonkers; St. John’s–Wilmot Episcopal Church, New Rochelle; St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Yonkers; University of Iowa Libraries; University of South Florida Library; United States Department of Justice; United States Naval Academy, Annapolis; Village of Norwood (New York); Westchester County Surrogate’s Court; Westchester Historical Society; Yonkers Public Library; Yonkers Historical Society.

During the gestation of a book, amid the clamor of the new, the solace of a few old friends proves vital. For
Norman Rockwell,
I reached out to three people who have traveled my path long enough to teach me much about loyalty, love, and generosity of spirit: Suzanne Ford, Lorraine Miller, and Abbas Raza.

Finally, with that turn toward the inevitable that every writer anticipates as the journey’s reward, I thank my family. My parents and parents-in-law, to whom I dedicate this book, for their nurturance and faith; my sister and sister-in-law and loving brothers these women have given me, Marybeth and Steve and Anita and Tommy, for their unwavering support. To another brother, Michael, and to Donna and Shane for opening their hearts to me about complicated, shared family. And to my children, Devon and Colin, whose never-failing patience, pride, and encouragement have urged me on when I was awfully tired; to Geof Oppenheimer, whose sanction from the art world proper reassured me. Even with all that support, however, it has been Ian Claridge, my philosopher-son from his earliest years, who has physically and mentally boosted this project most: his incisive queries, his imaginative ruminations, his bibliographic references, his balanced critique—all have invigorated the quality of my own thought. It is a particularly deep pleasure to get such nourishment back from one’s child.

My husband, Dennis Oppenheimer, first suggested this book, and he has quietly, steadfastly, pragmatically shored me up throughout its birth. If I have been guilty at moments of entering into the Rockwellian vignette too hopefully, his is the blame: he has made our home as near an ideal as I ever imagined possible. This book salutes him, as husband, father, and man.

Part I

NEW YORK

1

Narrative Connections, the Heart of an Illustrator

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

—Joan Didion,
The White Album

Norman Rockwell was not sadistic. He was, however, expert at creating desire, both in his public and in his private life. His family, who too often felt themselves to be “living out the cover of a
Saturday Evening Post,
” as his oldest son, Jarvis, once expressed it, were routinely seduced by his invitations of intimacy, though the artist established a subtle but impermeable distance when they tried to respond. His real sensitivity was reserved for his art, his empathy lavished on his easel, day after day, for over six decades. As do many artists, he tended to exorcise his internal tensions in his paintings, so that the energy that might have been expended on the work of rearing three sons born within six years of each other exploded into the narrative stories on his canvas instead. In the summer of 1954, for instance, at the height of his powers, Rockwell undertook a
Saturday Evening Post
cover of an aspiring artist studying master works in a museum,
The Art Critic,
published on April 16, 1955. The cover shows a young man scrutinizing a woman’s décolletage in the head-and-shoulders portrait in front of him, while on the adjacent wall, prosperous Dutch burghers in an Old Master painting appear to start with indignation and amusement as they watch the impudent student. The model for the student was Rockwell’s son Jarvis (named after the illustrator’s father); for the portrait the young critic studies so assiduously, Rockwell used his wife (and Jarvis’s mother), Mary.

The timing of this particular painting, in terms of familial harmony, was way off. Mary had been struggling valiantly against alcoholism and depression—possibly a bipolar illness—for at least five years. The family had been racked by the demise of their formerly predictable upper-middle-class home, as the mother, previously the anchor of their household, suddenly needed all the tending. Boarding school plans had been upended in an attempt to rally round her, trips were rescheduled, tremendous amounts of money were poured into treatments, and finally, a permanent move was undertaken from Arlington, Vermont, where the family had lived since 1939, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, when it became clear that Mary’s treatments at the Austen Riggs Center would be long-term. Unknown to the family, as they struggled to adjust to Mary’s illness Rockwell suffered a simultaneous spate of suicidal thoughts.

Jarvis, however, could give both his parents a run for their money, and in terms of expensive sessions with mental healthcare specialists, he did exactly that. From his earliest years, he was a particularly complicated member of the family: “I never caught on to what you’re supposed to do in school,” he remembers. “So it kind of never made sense to me, from the beginning.” Born in 1931, by 1938 Jarvis had been displaced by two younger brothers, and as he approached second grade, his parents were contemplating yet another major dislocation in his young life. The next year, they would decide to leave the sophisticated enclave of New Rochelle, New York, to make their home in Arlington, Vermont. A greater contrast is hard to imagine, at least on the face of it. New Rochelle fed on the overspill from Manhattan, seeing itself as a haven for worldly artists, entertainers, and intellectuals who wanted to be within commuting distance of the city, while enjoying the yacht club environment of what many treated as a wealthy distant suburb of the city. Even at his young age, Jarvis would feel the shock of adjusting to a bucolic life after the faster pace of his earlier years.

Between the move at age nine and posing for
The Art Critic
immediately prior to his twenty-third birthday, Rockwell’s eldest son re-trod many of his father’s steps, though too often, to Jarvis, they seemed to be missteps. He, too, had dropped out of high school; he, too, attended not only art school but his father’s own, the Art Students League in New York City. And though “Pop,” the name the boys conferred on their father when they became adolescents, ostensibly encouraged Jarvis’s efforts, praising lavishly to others his son’s work, the young artist grew up feeling distant from the father whose somewhat vague friendliness left his son desperate for a closer connection.

By 1954, Jarvis had been in and out of art schools, the Air Force, and psychiatric treatment. He was, in the lingo of a later age, trying to find himself. And he was trying hard to understand how to position himself as an aspiring artist in an art world that rejected as inconsequential the achievements of his father, whose technique Jarvis at least deeply appreciated, but whose storytelling in oils found expression, after all, only on mass-reproduced magazine covers. As soon as he was finished posing for Pop this time, Jarvis planned to head off for the Boston Museum of Art School, a more competitive program than any his father had attended.

No account exists of Rockwell’s inspiration for
The Art Critic.
Preparing even more feverishly than he did for most of his covers, however, he went through dozens of charcoal sketches, color renderings, and redirection of the mise-en-scène. The flirtatious, attractive woman for whom Mary Rockwell posed took the form of at least ten variations alone, from an early frowning hausfrau to the beautiful damsel that preceded the final image. More impressive still was the illustrator’s long indecision over what to place in the frame on the museum’s right wall. He completed two detailed paintings in contrasting Dutch styles; in addition to the group portrait of the men, he executed fully a landscape genre scene.

Until the last moment, Rockwell alternated between the two pieces, unsure which effect he preferred. In the charcoal on board that he drew immediately prior to his oil sketch, the painting to the right of the student critic is the Dutch landscape, with windmill, elaborate forestry, and tiny figures in the background. But in the end, he chose the parody of a Dutch group scene, which historically implied the weight of patriarchal authority. Vacillating between a genre that suggested a domestic tranquillity and one that invoked the power of his fathers, Rockwell went with the idea of ancestral censure and brought down the full force of his family and aesthetic pedigree on the poor befuddled art student, hapless in the ways of the world and of art.

The student himself metamorphosed from an initially disheveled outsider into a more suave Easterner: “Finally, my father changed my face so much it hardly looks like me,” the model remembers. In one of Rockwell’s earliest pen-and-charcoal sketches, Jarvis is given long uncombed hair, a soft, almost nonexistent jawline, and made to appear nearly myopic, his glasses sliding down his nose, as he stands within an inch of a startled-looking housewife in order to study her portrait. He is, in other words, presented as a sloppy, unkempt beatnik, an identity he had in fact been fostering.

The finished painting consists instead of a slender, well-groomed, slightly droopy-lidded young man, painterly accoutrements of his trade under his arm, standing in front of a portrait in the Netherlandish section of a museum. This eager neophyte, seen only in profile—in contrast to the frontal views of the Dutch group portrait—exhibits a supercilious facial expression and an aristocratic sharp chin, accentuated by his proprietary leaning in toward the woman’s portrait. The ersatz sophistication is offset by the childlike way that he nearly squeezes his legs together, his feet perfectly aligned on the tile floor, their toes almost pushed upward by their owner’s rigid lower body. Rockwell’s frequent device of exaggerating the subject’s derriere is employed here to undercut any authority the young art critic might have claimed otherwise; instead, the viewer of the cover is invited to assume the superior, knowing position: benign, wise interpreter of the scene.

The finished painting positions the oddly disruptive parody of the Dutch Masters group scene to the right of the voyeuristic student, in the pictorial plane of his palette and easel, perpendicular to his open art history book with its reproduction of the woman’s portrait. Rockwell’s deliberately formulaic Old Master painting, its antecedents the famous group portraits by both Frans Hals and Rembrandt, revisited his own earlier family romance. His admiration for seventeenth-century Netherlandish painters was one of the few passions he shared with his parents, with whom he continued to live for several years while he went to art school. His father’s own not inconsequential sketches clearly were modeled on studies of the Dutch and English countryside; and the domestic painting that lost out to the group portrait in
The Art Critic
was strikingly similar to the older man’s homey sketches.

Father-son issues not resolved in their own time passed down to Jarvis and Norman Rockwell. What part mockery versus a more gentle condescension plays in the psychodrama of
The Art Critic
remains incalculable to its principal model. It was not entirely clear to Rockwell’s oldest son how much his father really respected his progeny’s work. Rockwell could slide from speaking of “Jerry’s” terrific modern art one minute to referring to his son’s local installation piece as the “string mess up on the hill” the next. Probably both attitudes were real, given Rockwell’s lifelong ambivalence toward abstraction. And Jerry, since late adolescence, had begun to deprecate his father’s painting, his newfound superiority hard to hide from Pop. The son’s claim to know, his right even to judge his father, takes shape in
The Art Critic
in the proprietary posture of the student, bending over the detail of the portrait with his magnifying glass in one hand, his easel, palette, and reproduction of the painting in the other. A slightly weary expression, something between smugness and an unguarded absorption, captures the poseur’s incoherence, the lack of an authentic center. His innocence is further compromised by the hint of pursed lips, as if ready to kiss the painting. Worse still, the young artist is magnifying the brooch perilously close to the woman’s décolletage; the smirk she has assumed seems a cross between an admonishment and a come-on.

Jarvis Rockwell does not like to talk about this painting. “It was very unpleasant for me,” he says. “It’s true that my mother and I never posed together for this piece. But that’s why I realized that there was all this stuff going on, and that my father, on some level, was too polite or too timid to force our faces in it literally. As usual, we were living on the cover of a magazine.” Jarvis was embarrassed to contribute to the painting’s ribald implications, since his mother’s bosom was the object of his gaze. “My father made it very plain that the sexual joke was important to the painting,” he remembers. What Mary Rockwell thought of the whole thing goes unnoted; loyal wife of a prominent artist, she buried any conflicts she had at the time with alcohol and pills. The millions of readers who welcomed that April 16, 1955,
Saturday Evening Post
cover into their homes didn’t realize the family drama writ large that the cover shared with them, Rockwell’s other—and at least equally important—family. Questions of influence, of talent, of generation, of authority, and of the vexed center of family love all reverberate as one painting within the painting relates to the other, and the parodies and substitutions and historical references feast on one another.

What tale would Rockwell have claimed to be telling in
The Art Critic
? Norman Rockwell told stories. That was his job as an illustrator, and over the decades he stressed that, for him, the hardest part of his work always was coming up with ideas to narrate in the absence of a text written by others. And
Post
covers, as he said on more than one occasion, had to be read within a few seconds, the manifest meaning laid out through the artful accretion of details. Given those thematic elements of the painting that remained unchanged from his earliest pencil sketch,
The Art Critic
asks to be understood as, at the least, a young, earnest, overconfident art student yielding up his professionalism to female pulchritude. In the process, his artistic and historical elders gently show their superiority, through their mock outrage and hints of laughter that acknowledge this normal misguided stage of youth. Themes of looking, illicit views and presumptuous vantage points among them, knit together the young art critic, daring to judge, and the Dutch ancestors—woman and man, the old and the young, the new and the dated. Final authority is granted to the viewer—the wise spectator looking in on the picture who is expected, surely, to smile at the too-earnest artist who is still miles, decades, ages away from the achievements of his father(s).

Did Rockwell actually reflect upon the template of family desire and ambition embedded in this painting too fraught for his sons to enjoy? Of course not. But we know that by 1954, Norman Rockwell had been put through the wringer in terms of delving into his own psyche. At least as important, he had always developed his narrative line through accretive yokings, visual puns, and meaning that begot meaning, an almost classical, psychoanalytically oriented process of free association.