Norman Rockwell

Introduction and Acknowledgments

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

—Virginia Woolf

A confession, since such is the stuff of biographies: I began this project keenly interested in the cultural history encompassed by Norman Rockwell’s life and career but equally unsure if spending years on the illustrator himself would sustain my interest. I needn’t have worried: this major-league player of twentieth-century America stepped up to the plate deftly, deflecting my fastballs, my curves, my sliders—sometimes obvious in his moves, more often wily. To my surprise and chagrin, I ended up falling half in love with my subject—and then dumping him in disgust the next day. A fickle romantic, I nonetheless decided that it was not my fault, this confusion, but Norman Rockwell who thwarted constancy instead. No wonder he kept me spinning. No wonder that he kept me coming back.

And therein lies a major theme that emerges from the near century of Rockwell’s life: he was a master at creating desire in others. Highly intelligent man that he was, he early on figured out the basic economy that would keep people coming back for more: he had to withhold something while he appeared to give in excess. Mastery of this dynamic allowed him to remain an intensely private person even as his extraordinary celebrity spawned the illusion that he shared himself completely and intimately with his public.

Norman Rockwell, illustrator, was no different from most artists fully focused on their talent, and this meant putting his art ahead of his family. In fact, he often appropriated the emotional marrow of his relationships with his three wives and three sons (from his second marriage) in order to feed an audience always clamoring for more. As far as many Americans were concerned, however, Norman Rockwell exemplified the country’s heartland; he was its everyman. It is true that Rockwell did not seek deliberately to counter such an image; still, he also did nothing to hide the far more dramatic texture of his domestic life. He spoke openly and surprisingly often about his private demons. Probably to his detriment, his gentle self-revelation developed into a means of unconsciously manipulating others into taking care of him; and the important truth of his chronic depression went untended until he was an old man.

But I came to this biography through Norman Rockwell’s work, not his life. It was the summer of 1995, and my husband and I took our two youngest children to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Adjacent to the memorabilia exhibit was a small room of sports paintings, where I drifted somewhat aimlessly, my interest in representations of all things athletic long exceeded. Suddenly I was riveted by a canvas whose saturated color and fine draftsmanship were put to truly democratic use: the painting gently and lovingly mocked the seriousness with which baseball was regarded. Aggressively strong horizontal and vertical lines, the depth of field imaginatively multiplied by three parallel planes on which separate actions were taking place—who could this be? Glancing at the artist’s name, I was shocked: Calling the Game, by Norman Rockwell. This was Norman Rockwell? Growing up, I’d heard of Rockwell mostly through magazine pages touting the Famous Artists’ School, and I’d seen his work reproduced on countless calendars and ceramic plates. I had no idea that he possessed the technique and painterly sophistication to render such an oil—ignorance on my part that, I quickly discovered, typified the attitude of many of my generation.

Now in front of me was a painting with colors that were bracingly clean, the palette fastidiously chosen. Its intelligent negotiation of figure and space as well as the consummate painterly qualities bespoke values prior to those of Modernism. I was flummoxed, to risk a Rockwellian locution.

Back home, involved in completing a biography of a different sort of figural painter, I found myself sneaking breaks from my current project to take peeks at Rockwell’s complete portfolio. From Internet forays to purchases at the local bookstore to interlibrary loan requests for out-of-print books, a catalogue of this man’s life’s work began to take shape in my mind. The size of his output alone—more than four thousand pieces—was dizzying, but even more impressive was his diversity of illustrative styles. Early sketches in Boys’ Life were broad, loosely painted; and years later, after decades of not using this technique, he could still invoke it at will. During that same initial stage of his career, his work frequently seemed indebted to the fashionable illustrations that depended on romanticized yet sinewy, elegant, often two-dimensional figures. Within a few years, however, Rockwell had mastered a brushstroke of such control that the oil seemed to tighten on the canvas as you looked at it—at times, too much—and he exploited this talent in pursuit of the one last, perfect detail that would make his painting great.

I knew within months of that day in Cooperstown that opinion was not only wildly mixed on the proper way to appreciate Norman Rockwell but that, more surprising to me yet, the art world had been reacting in just this way since the beginning. I had expected to find a reception history that lauded his work until, say, the early fifties, when Abstract Expressionism had left little room even in the popular imagination for domestic painters such as Rockwell. Instead, the same arguments still raging today served as the backdrop to many articles on the artist in the 1920s. Is illustration worthy of comparison to fine art? Are such categories viable anyway? Is subject matter, formal execution, or historical innovation most important? Was it just his sentimentality, or was there more that kept Norman Rockwell from canonical status in the modern art world? The battles currently being waged over Rockwell in newspapers and journals began almost at the inception of his career, as surprising as that seems in light of the mythology of his Arcadian past, before modern art supposedly snubbed him out of existence. In truth, Rockwell began working at the height, not in the aftermath, of America’s education in Modernism; he attended the landmark 1913 New York Armory Show, an exhibition of more than sixteen hundred pieces of modern painting and sculpture, while in art school in Manhattan.

A few professional voices, such as the Washington Post critic Paul Richard, reminded me that they’d been on the record decades ago as appreciating Rockwell’s talent, when such praise incurred the contempt of other journalists. And Ferdinand Protzman, Richard’s colleague at the Post, recalled how he’d admired Rockwell since his early adulthood spent in Italy, where the Europeans taught him to understand Rockwell’s particular mastery.

Equally significant, there have been notable artists who voiced their genuine appreciation of Rockwell’s painterly talent before such an assessment was even remotely fashionable. But when John Updike and Tom Wolfe added their praise of Rockwell to that of the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, the social realist Ben Shahn, and the pop artist Andy Warhol, the celebrity supporters tended to be dismissed as eccentric exceptions among the cognoscenti. Their judgments were, for the most part, tolerated as their right—they had earned the ability to hold the aberrant opinion. Later, when Steven Spielberg explained that without Rockwell he couldn’t have produced his cinematic view of life, there was no great gasp, no shock of recognition. Indeed, Rockwell’s own productions assimilated all too easily the charge of sentimentality leveled against the filmmaker.

And yet: the times, they are a-changin’. When I started hearing from my artist stepson in Berkeley that it was cool to get Rockwell, and when my lazy Saturday wanderings in Manhattan and Washington galleries produced enthusiastic assays by young comers to the effect that they not only liked Rockwell, they felt themselves influenced by his attention to form and color in the name of a story—well, then I began to believe that the art world had belched forth a new template. I had actually become optimistic about the resurgence of figural painting in 1988, when Alex Katz won wide acclaim for his show at the Brooklyn Museum (where Rockwell had received his first major retrospective): maybe the heralding of this artist who had traveled his own idiosyncratic, noncategorical way for so many years meant that audiences were going to be offered a more capacious palette from which to choose the pleasures they preferred.

I reflected upon such decade-old optimism while working in the Rockwell Museum archives at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where I quizzed the energetic, deeply engaged Ph.D. students camping out beside me, following their own critical theses that centered upon Norman Rockwell’s art. One of their professors, art historian Robert Rosenblum, had reminded me that just as twentieth-century thinkers seriously revisited Victorian culture only when that era became remote enough to lack threat, so Rockwell had needed to fade in time before modern scholarship could risk immersion in his aura. These hip, intellectually engaged graduate-school scholars seemed proof positive of such a chronology of engagement.

No soothsayer, I don’t pretend to know what such changes portend. I read better the suggestions of actual experience—the fact that many of society’s best-educated people whose paths I cross in daily life had started sharing with me, almost defiantly (before the exhibition of 1999 made such admissions acceptable), that they had loved Rockwell all these years. Now they felt liberated to confess such allegiance to me without fear of censure. Patronized if they professed any serious admiration and delight, they had felt intimidated by that vague thing called institutional or critical opinion, what the knowing they thought and said. Indeed, this very need for experts to guide them in matters of aesthetics—the difficulty for many of enjoying, untutored, the abstraction of so much great twentieth-century art—had bred unfortunate suspicions about the art being touted. Too often, it seemed mandatory that to merit value, a painting had to be remote from the shared experiences most commonly the subject of narrative art. Though a longtime devotee of modern art, I agreed with such assessments: something is wrong when we reach a stage where art that does not require the mediation of a schooled critic lacks value because of its accessibility to the masses.

.  .  .

Energized by the tumult, I began to reconsider Norman Rockwell, both the impact that the man had on the twentieth century, and the value of his art. Unknown to me when I started, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, had long been working on convincing prominent institutions across the country to support a major retrospective tour of Rockwell’s career. As a result of the unflagging efforts of museum director Laurie Norton Moffat and curators Maureen Hart-Hennessey, Anne Knutson (High Museum of Art), and Judy Larson (Art Museum of Western Virginia), Rockwell took front and center stage throughout much of 1999, with art critics scrambling to weigh in with their judgments of the illustrator’s place inside (or outside) their discipline. A few, such as Robert Rosenblum, Dave Hickey, Paul Richard, and, to some extent, Peter Schjeldahl and Arthur Danto—those who had long been on record as (unfashionably) respecting, beyond the acceptable limit, Rockwell’s work—repeated their thoughtful and sometimes qualified admiration, this time to a more interested audience. The middle ground was occupied by reviewers who praised the plurality of the current art scene, one that permits us to appreciate Rockwell’s technical skills while abjuring his sentimental (nonartistic) vision and values; others, like Deborah Solomon, went further, but in a different direction, celebrating in The New York Times Magazine that expanded room in the marketplace for the best of bad art, the triumph of kitsch—the Rockwellian cheeseburgers we sometimes prefer to a steady diet of haute cuisine. A few, Hilton Kramer among them, maintained their judgments that Rockwell was not art, and that there the matter should end.

We Americans have, it appears, mastered the lessons of Modernism. And after Modernism won the right to create its own traditions, the need to oppose anything that might chip at its defensive self-righteousness disappeared. Those battles over, the majority of us seem to believe that there is room for everyone at the table, at least temporarily, until the manners are judged, until the napkins are crumpled at the end of the meal, and the host decides who will be invited back.

Still, one might grumble that the Museum of Modern Art’s 1990–91 High & Low exhibit, touted as containing more than three hundred examples of art that confounded the old hierarchy, should have included a Rockwell or two. But though pages from children’s books and fan belts from Cadillacs greeted the eager spectators bent on seeing the new amalgams of culture, Rockwell didn’t fit in here, either. Neither high nor low, Rockwell’s proximity to either world made him a near miss in both. The demise of Marxism aside, the twentieth-century view that art should scrutinize a culture’s dominant values has basically held the day. Where was the salutary effect of Rockwell’s art, where was its attempt to defamiliarize the dominant culture, in order to make us see anew; where was the critique?

One way that some critics have elected to back into the problem, so to speak, has been to manipulate Rockwell into escaping the whole dilemma. The nation’s first father of popular culture was, it turns out, conveniently called Pop by his sons, a delicious coincidence that anticipates the postmodern culture that today would claim him as its own. Earnest art critics, eager to determine a respectable way to include him anew in the art histories of the twentieth century, find themselves mesmerized by the prospect of wedding popular to postmodern: perhaps Norman Rockwell’s decades of sentimental, narrative painting prophesied the postmodern brilliance of marrying high and low culture; maybe Rockwell was pomo in spite of himself. If nothing else, Rockwell’s art clearly was meant to be disposable (a good thing) versus monumental (negative), finding its temporary home on the cover of magazines that were discarded weekly.

This biography engages in such theoretical questions more by implication than directly. I have sought to offer one interpretation of the complicated, fascinating long life of a major modern American figure. The very lack of a full-length biography of a man of Norman Rockwell’s long-term fame intrigued me, especially as the reasons for such a rude omission are implicated in the shifts of aesthetic tastes and social values that the march of the twentieth century demanded. My account is limited in the way that all historical assessments are, by the lack of a bird’s-eye view. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written, Mark Twain wrote in his own self-history.

I console myself that most readers nowadays hold truth to be a complicated achievement, and few among us believe anyone’s telling of a life to be the final word, the only way of its telling. Because those of us in the twenty-first century are close to Rockwell’s times—seeing them, quite rightly, as the context from which our own lives emerge—we mine such lives as a means to understand the families that spawned us and the selves we’ve become.

It obviously wasn’t all that incongruous for me to wed my initial interest in Norman Rockwell’s Calling the Game with the more academic interests I’d long been pondering, theoretical questions about biographies, histories, and other narrative art forms. I decided I wanted to know all about the man who lived his own life grounded in the power of narrative, of telling stories. Over the countless trips I made to Stockbridge to work in the extensive Rockwell archives, capped by a writing fellowship at the International Ledig House in Hudson, New York, I came to trust my first aesthetic instincts. The shock of recognition that I had first felt when seeing Rockwell anew—really, for the first time—back in Cooperstown, remained true to the place where I ended.

And it proved especially fortunate that I wrote the first draft of Norman Rockwell during my idyllic retreat among poets, novelists, reporters, and visual artists from Sweden, Bangladesh, Spain, Germany, Poland, and England. These colleagues helped me think about the differences between the intimidation of Americans by institutional criticism and the greater freedom abroad to stand by one’s sensuous reaction to art as a valid criterion for its worth. The Catskill Mountains at sunset, the autumnal colors competing against the sun’s defiantly brilliant nocturne, painted an almost too perfectly clichéd backdrop for many intense international discussions about Rockwell’s talent. After all, Rockwell’s Massachusetts and Vermont homes were both an easy drive from here, their Berkshires and Green Mountains mere variations on our local Hudson Valley panorama.

But I also realized how Norman Rockwell’s presence was recorded in my life even closer to home. A few months earlier, writing yet another thank-you note to an acquaintance of Norman Rockwell generous with his time, I found my afternoon’s work at a Brooklyn waterfront café interrupted by the antics of two art students laughing over their sodas and onion rings. After they filled their straws with cola, they expertly squirted the stream of liquid to imaginary lines on the street below, deciding that whoever hit closest to the East River was destined to make a six-figure sale first. Probably because my project was drawing to a close, nostalgia overtook me, and I was transported vividly, if for only a minute, to the similar scenes that must have occurred around 1915, when Norman Rockwell shared studio space with his art school friends in this same neighborhood. The landscape has remained fairly constant, but Rockwell and his buddies were talking about where they could gain exposure: money, they scoffed, wasn’t meant for real artists, a position Rockwell took pains in later years to disavow. I wondered what he would think of these students, so comfortable admitting that their ambitions included monetary success. At the very least, he would have found them interesting, his curiosity one of his most salient features.

Over the years, Rockwell’s celebrity has proved cumbersome to his three sons, and it took but a few interviews for me to see the potential barrier it would erect for me as well. Americans, especially those whose lives he personally graced with a way he had of making people feel important, believed they owed him his hero’s status, and that too much information might tarnish the mythology. As a result of his fans’ reluctance to commit potential sacrilege, the family’s cooperation and the precedents they established turned out to be especially important in the research for this biography. All three sons, of strikingly different temperaments but sharing a communal decorum, graciousness, and goodwill toward others, promoted publicly their hard-won belief that it was time to make peace with their father’s humanity—that he was weak as well as strong, and there was nothing to be ashamed of in that. Jarvis Rockwell, the artist’s eldest son, made himself available whenever and however I wanted to talk, in spite of illness and pressing professional concerns. His interest in the mind’s processes and his years of scrupulous introspection made him a particularly rich source of informed speculation. Tom Rockwell inconvenienced himself without hesitation every time I asked for help, and he delivered that help with a gentle humor, lively wit, and modesty that surely hinted at his father, as well as attesting to his own strengths as a writer. Often I left his farmhouse feeling a bit more in touch with the affection the illustrator had so effortlessly bred in others. Peter Rockwell, the youngest of the three, met me everywhere—literally as well as psychologically in this case, since we conversed in Atlanta, Stockbridge, and Tuscany, where he even gave me a free lesson in stone carving. The precision demanded in his art reverberated in his conversations about his father: Peter repeatedly and carefully fine-tuned his reflections so that I felt him a real ally in my search for some kind of truth. These men—not coincidentally artists all—as well as their lively, thoughtful wives, Nova, Gail, and Cinny, provided physical hospitality in addition to allowing me the material support of their memories and personal archives. Jarvis, Tom, and Peter Rockwell proved extraordinary resources and exemplary sons: alternately skeptical, proud, loving, unsure of their father, they were both loyal and honest about him—a difficult combination—though it was clear that these emotions proved costly at times.

The museum built around Norman Rockwell, where the archives contain everything from the illustrator’s four pairs of eyeglasses to more than thirty boxes of his business correspondence alone, was an idyllic place to study my subject. Its director, Laurie Norton Moffatt, ensured that the repository was open to my intrusions, its collection easily accessible to my sometimes overreaching curiosity, in spite of the inconvenience my presence frequently caused. But in terms of sheer impact on this biography, no book or individual has approached the influence of Linda Pero, curator of the museum’s archives. With her encyclopedic and learned grasp of her subject, her quiet and strong sense of Rockwellian duty—meaning that for her, hard work and graciousness go hand in hand—she is every researcher’s dream. For such as us mere mortals, she tethers her creative intelligence to the fastidious world of archival documents, numbers, and other artifacts of hard history. Not only her practical advice but the sagacity of her insights enriched my own a hundredfold. I thank her for enabling this project to see daylight.

Although it is true that when I began my research no comprehensive biography yet existed of Norman Rockwell, there were dozens of immeasurably useful and often well-informed books about various aspects of his art and person. Particularly helpful for my purposes were Arthur Guptill’s pioneering study of Rockwell’s technique, Norman Rockwell, Illustrator, especially significant because the artist cooperated with the author during its composition; Thomas Buechner’s invaluable Norman Rockwell, Artist and Illustrator; Christopher Finch’s Norman Rockwell: 322 Magazine Covers, with some of the most trenchant and on-target evaluations of Rockwell’s major oils that exist, in spite of too many factual errors; Jan Cohn’s Covers of the Saturday Evening Post; Donald Walton’s chatty A Rockwell Portrait; Susan Meyer’s books on Rockwell’s models and on great illustrators in general; and Laurie Norton Moffatt’s Definitive Catalogue, an indispensable tool for any student of Rockwell. More recently, by going back to the drawing board themselves—by refusing too easy classifications and categorizations—the social and art historians Dave Hickey, Karal Ann Marling, Wanda Korn, and Michele Bogart have elevated the discourse surrounding Rockwell, brilliantly nudging the vocabulary used to explore his work into one of serious—not to say solemn—cultural respectability. Students of Rockwell today are heavily in their debt; they were there first. Also fortunate for Rockwell scholars is the plethora of good picture books that exists; their first-rate quality ensures that readers of this biography have easy access to much of Rockwell’s oeuvre. Given his substantial output, any severely edited selection ends up somewhat capricious and personal, but in general I have tried to provide examples of different periods, different genres, and most of all, of his finest painting per se, the oils that could be at home in any thoughtful collection of twentieth-century art.

Humility—the acknowledgment that no one creates alone—is one of the first lessons taught by the demands of this particular genre. To complete the project in a timely fashion, sustaining along the way the same enthusiasm with which I began, I have relied over the past several years on a handful of people who patiently allowed me to talk or to research Rockwell with them again and again, as I tried to absorb into myself their own special knowledge of the subject: Robert Berridge, John Favareau, Wayne Kempton, Virginia Loveless, and Dick Rockwell. Others tended my project in far less direct ways that probably I alone recognize: Bruce Fleming, Phil Jason, Elizabeth Langland, Dori Sless, Joseph Wittreich, and Arnold Dino Rivera, whose expansive knowledge of the human body and its possible ailments, in concert with a humanity that, cliché though it may be, shines forth from his eyes, makes him a surgeon I’d choose any day.

For advice about the ever-elusive psyche, mental health specialists Sue Erikson Bloland, Robert Coles, Kaye Redfield Jamison, and Jennifer Naidich provided wise observations and cautious clues that helped me understand Norman Rockwell far better than I could have on my own. In varying degrees, they blended friendship with professionalism, a nexus that yielded yet more bounty during the biographer’s hunt.

I have learned that during the writing of any book, certain individuals bear an importance disproportionate to their actual involvement with the project. Arthur Danto, Robert Rosenblum, and Michel Witmer hold pride of place for Norman Rockwell: the first two learned professors took time to encourage my vision even when they bore weighty demands on their own schedules, and the notoriously generous art dealer shared his near encyclopedic knowledge of art historical moments with me, week after week, year after year.

Others with me on a near daily basis were my invaluable research assistants. Lulen Walker and Elizabeth Ann Parker worked fast and furiously early on, before leaving for curatorial positions. Devin Orgeron proved an adroit, intuitive interviewer in California as well as places East. Ingrid Satelmajer’s sharp intellect prompted my rethinking every time she read a chapter of the manuscript, and her natural warmth smoothed more rough corners than texts alone. The burden of assistance, however, was borne by Tracey Middlekauff and Marsha Orgeron, and if I had a wish list for the future, they’d be near the top of it. Whenever I needed them (often), wherever (all over the country), whatever (from redoing three hundred endnotes to translating Latin marriage certificates), they delivered. They saved me from countless errors; they went the extra mile to assuage my fears. I am deeply grateful for their presence.

There were other people at my side throughout this project: Linda Chester, my agent, and her associate, Julie Rubenstein, eased my way professionally and personally. Their enthusiasm, friendship, and affection buoyed my spirits whenever they were flagging. At Random House, I was lucky to have Caroline Cunningham design a beautiful interior, Casey Hampton a perfect series of photo inserts, and Dan Rembert a handsome jacket; and Benjamin Dreyer, the production editor, with the assistance of the sharp eyes of John McGhee and proofreaders Michael Burke and Maria Massey, magnificently put the pages through their paces until they came out a book. Matt Thornton helped us all, one way or another. Early on, Ann Godoff’s support and Jonathan Karp’s editorial sponsorship had convinced me that I’d found the right home for Rockwell’s biography. Then, when Susanna Porter edited the manuscript, I decided that this home was very heaven. Her intelligence and sensitivity to language saved me from every possible kind of mistake; she did so with utmost grace and tactfulness; and she pulled it all off creatively, sometimes working in unconventional methods in order to avoid the delays common to biographies. She is, in short, every writer’s dream editor.

Many individuals bound not to my text but to Norman Rockwell himself gave selflessly when I turned to them for help—most of them strangers to me until their efforts bridged that gap: Betty Parmelee Aaronson, Barbara Alan, Mary Best Alcambra, Lyn Austin, Joanne Bartoli, Jonathan Best, Terry Bragg, Sue Bronstein, Thomas Buechner, Paul Camp, Stephanie Cassidy, Ardis Clark, Christopher Clark, Rachel Clark, Jan Cohn, Sally Hill Cooper, Barbara Davis, Kara Dowd, Amy Edgerton, Bud Edgerton, Joy Edgerton, Kai Erikson, Barclay Feather, Peter Franck, Ilene Frank, Joy Freisatz, Lawrence Friedman, Elizabeth Fuller, Bill George, Shelley Getchell, Dalia Giladi, Jim Gilkinson, Tom Glazier, Judy Goffman-Cutler, Leah Schaeffer Goodfellow, Jennifer Gould, Douglas Greenberg, Trevor Hall, Lauren Henkley, Bradford and Kay Hertzog, Dave Hickey, Charles and Maren Hobson, Tom and Jeannette Hochtor, Helen Hutchinson, Gary Jaffe, Nancy Jarman, Timothy V. Johnson, Clemens Kalischer, Deane Keller, Fran Kessler, David Knowles, Pam Koob, Matt Kuhnert, Terry Lehr, Barry Lewis, Susan Lyman, Constance Malpas, Donald March, Allison Marchese, Karal Ann Marling, Margaret McBurnie, Pam Mendelsohn, David Ment, Susan Merrill, Susan Meyer, David Michaelis, Melissa Mosqueda, Francis Murphy, Kenneth John Myers, Chris Niebuhr, William Nordling, Tim O’Brien, Pat O’Donnell, Mary Amy Orpen, Robert Orpen, Anka Palitz, Barbara Davis Pappas, Dean X. Parmelee, Fred Paulmann, Anne Pelham, Gene Pelham, Elizabeth Peters, Steve Pettinga, Yvette Cohen Pomerantz, Gloria Pritts, Ferdinand Protzman, Mary Quinn, Tom Range, Cris Raymond, Azra Raza, Sugra Raza, Walt Reed, Paul Richard, Bea Rockwell, Daisy Rockwell, Mary Rockwell, Peigi Rockwell, Michael Rubenstein, Cecelia A. St. Jean, Steve Schlein, Ron Schweiger, Eric Segal, Richard Seigman, Theresa Sharp, Maryann Smith, Janet Solinger, Leo Spinelli, William Stauffer, Ann Stokes, Nan Timmerman, Betsey Travis, Kathleen Triem, Miriam Tuba, Agata Tuszynska, John Updike, Leonard Verrastro, Ida Washington, Mary Welsh, Ess White, Nancy White, Jonathan Witte, Nancy Barstow Wynkoop, David Wood, and Mitchell Yockelson.

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.

In the late 1940s, for instance, he explained for the benefit of the students he was then teaching that in a picture which tells a story, the idea itself probably is the most important element of the entire illustration. For an instructor who insisted on the primary importance of technique, of mastering the principles of traditional draftsmanship and color, this was an illuminating statement. And it is a position that he reiterated over the decades, usually adding wryly, as he did here, that he had always found this the hardest part of his profession—coming up with a good idea. After all, he expounded, it wasn’t enough to come up with something that the artist alone found meaningful; for an illustrator, a narrative idea had to possess near instant recognition for the audience. Usually I get my best ideas as I shave in the morning, Rockwell repeated throughout the years. I draw them on three-by-five squares of paper, then discard them until I get one I think I can go with.

That crucial next stage—developing a nugget into a narrative gold mine—involved a long associative habit of thinking, free ranging and unlimited in the directions in which it took the artist. He shared with the students enrolled at the Famous Artists’ School an example of this process, in which to begin the sequence he sketched a lamppost, which always gets me started, although where I will end I never know. Rockwell travels through ten more vignettes before that end point arrives, and, along the way, he plays with a drunken soldier, who morphs into a dutiful one sewing his pants, to a picture of the sailor’s mother mending them instead—with the family dog at hand; to the sailor transformed into a boy who tends to his sick dog, to a vet and dog, to doctors braving blizzards, to a sick girl missing out on a dance, to a square dance, to a cobbler fixing shoes, to a lone cowboy—shoes recall cowhide, cowhide recalls cows, cows recall cowboys. Still no idea so I must keep going until I finally do get one. At this point, he stops, assuming that the students get the point.

The clarity of Rockwell’s narrative covers is hard-won, that much is sure. Still, his free-associative method of deriving the thesis surely became second nature to him, given the number of stories he needed to create. And many of those covers tell more stories than one, if only we know where to look. It must have been emotionally costly at times for Rockwell to stir up silt, sift through it, and never stay around long enough to see it settle. But the benefit of such a strategy is clear, too: messy connections that began to surface inconveniently could be put down at once, unexamined further, and remixed later for additional use.

The Art Critic appears to be just this kind of achievement. In spite of the obvious family dramas played out in the painting, the complex emotions that motivated it were, the sons agree, probably too subterranean to rise to the level of consciousness in the man who welded them into a witty representation instead. I think the painting is cruel, though my father was not a cruel man, Jarvis’s youngest brother, Peter Rockwell, states today. Rockwell refused to get bogged down in the depressions he seemed always to hold at bay with more work. Beset by his own anxieties and constant professional comparisons, he often acted out his denials of the tensions in front of him through the overkill for which he became famous—the one detail too many, the picture never allowed to be finished, sent off still wet to the Post, nonetheless so finely articulated that it looked destined for the ages, not for an ephemeral magazine cover.

Through the supposedly impersonal theme of looking at art, The Art Critic rehearses the central love and commitment of Norman Rockwell’s life: his work. In the final cover, a balance has been established among the various acts of viewing, even of over-looking, or voyeurism, that the scene comprises. The young artist and the object of his fascinated study appear to be in a symbiotic relationship of sorts—her flirtatious, welcoming smile is familiar, and his scrutiny proprietary. It is the Dutch Masters to the side who disrupt the relationship between subject and object; theirs is the intervention of those who would dare judge. The painting had as its thematic antecedents works such as Fireman, from 1944, in which a distressed, even disgusted firefighter looked down from the inside of the portrait onto a burning cigar left on the bottom of the frame. In Rockwell’s reference to his own carelessness that a year earlier had caused his entire studio to burn to the ground, he raised the notion of authority, of who has the final say when looking at art. In Man Carrying Frame, painted two years after Fireman, he anticipated his bracketing in The Art Critic of an innocent whose self-regarding activity takes place between two museum masterpieces, the subjects of which stare out of their own frames in amazement at his presumption. The protagonist in Man Carrying Frame actually removes a frame from a painting in such a way that he ends up looking framed himself.

As the art historian Michael Fried points out in Absorption and Theatricality, painting that calls attention to itself, a common theme of the seventeenth century, became a staple of Modernism as a means of talking about art. Rockwell’s interest in self-reference was grounded only partially in philosophical questions about looking, being looked at, and the painter’s relationship to his audience, especially pertinent as those ideas were for someone whose artistic mainstay was producing covers for The Saturday Evening Post. His less theoretical text in the pictures about pictures spoke to the need for tolerance, for capaciousness, for an awareness that as soon as we judge others, we will find ourselves coming up short as well. In the end, Rockwell’s paintings about painting remind us that to presume superiority is to risk inevitable comeuppance oneself; that the act of seeing outside the frame must allow for difference. From this perspective, it is no stretch to see two paintings as disparate on most levels as The Art Critic and the 1960s civil rights piece, The Problem We All Live With, as sharing a common concern.

That Rockwell would sometimes draw from the murky regions of his unconscious to engender his covers is surely, upon reflection, no surprise. Most artists work on a very limited number of images at one time, as opposed to complete narratives that must stand on their own. Rockwell confronted a major challenge in inventing so many stories for the Post covers. Only months before he began The Art Critic, for instance, he painted the hauntingly beautiful Breaking Home Ties, which was published as the September 25, 1954, Post cover. The recent efforts of just about the entire Rockwell household to move away—including Mary’s frequent trips to the Riggs psychiatric institution—were mimed in this bittersweet representation of father and son taking their leave of each other. Family connections—and their breaking—were much on Rockwell’s mind in those days. And they had been for the past three years, since Mary had suggested that they divorce as a remedy for her unhappiness—Rockwell’s second wife to seek this solution.

Such themes accommodated thoughts that lay too deep for tears, to borrow from another Romantic poet of the quotidian, William Wordsworth. The Art Critic rehearsed the intertwined, emotionally fraught motivations that had funded Norman Rockwell’s career; and it reminded him that familial traits underwrote his right to such a destiny, much as he assumed was true for his eldest son. Markers from several generations had indicated to the illustrator even before he learned to write that art could be his way to compete among men. If painterly talent had not inspired emotional closeness among his relatives, it had funded much of the family pride in achievement, especially on his mother’s side. Even the connection he shared with his own rather browbeaten father, lacking as it was, came through their early shared love of telling stories through the pen and palette. Art and family, painting and love, loss and renewal: not the conventional dialogue of an illustrator. But for Norman Rockwell, they were the very substance of his life and his career.

2

Family Ties That Bind

Two Thomas Hills, born in England during the late 1820s, unrelated except by such coincidence, similarly staked out their futures in the New World: they were artists intent on specializing in landscapes, portraits, and even animal paintings. Both would produce artist sons named Thomas Hill as well, and the confluence of names and professions would engender confusion up to the present day. But in the mid-1860s, just as the more hapless of the shared-name patriarchs immigrated to the United States, the other and more fortunate senior Hill, who had already lived in Massachusetts for more than ten years, decided to go west. There he would become a highly successful, respected landscape painter, joining Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran among artists renowned for their aesthetic mastery of the American wilderness. Our newly arrived Thomas Hill, never as lucky in the fine arts as his talent probably deserved, would soon dig his heels into Yankee soil and paint portraits of beloved neighborhood animals one day, the peeling clapboard walls of neighborhood houses the next. His descendants would joke that his masterpiece legacy was his grandson, the heir whose domestic genre paintings would give voice to Middle America’s unarticulated yearnings better than the other successful Hill’s homage to the western sublime ever did.

Given the option, Norman Rockwell would probably have been ambivalent about which Thomas Hill to choose for his grandfather. Without a doubt, the great western painter would have anchored his progeny to a more elegant pedigree, worthy of envy even by that magnificent illustrator of the West, N. C. Wyeth. But Rockwell’s delight in the presence of well-meaning if larger-than-life men; his love of a good prank and his sly pleasure at the ribald suggestion; and his vivid rootedness in all things northeastern legitimize as an equally appropriate forebear the colorful, various, ill-behaved extrovert, Thomas Howard Hill.

Rockwell’s grandfather, fated to be the Thomas Hill that history forgot, sailed to America in the early 1860s, settling for the first few years in Hoboken, New Jersey, where his mother and father, Susannah and Thomas, had immigrated earlier. Hopeful that the career he had barely taken up in England would bear fruit in the new land, Thomas Hill, Jr., tried for several years to support his family by plying his art. But by 1866, the local directory reflects an adjustment in Hill’s expectations; his job, previously listed as artist, changes now to painter—of houses—matching the description of his father’s career. For reasons unclear, in 1867 or 1868, the peripatetic painter chose to relocate his family and his parents to Yonkers, New York, where he would begin to call himself by his middle name, Howard; city records reveal at least six Thomas Hills in Yonkers alone, and Thomas Howard Hill, however absurd his self-assessment, always liked to think of himself as distinguished.

Although