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NORMAN ROCKWELL : AT HOME IN VERMONT

Edited by Carolyn Bauer

D. Giles. 152 pages. £35.  ISBN 978-1-917273-35-0

Reviewed by Jim Burns

What do we know about Norman Rockwell? I’m asking from England, where, I suspect, there may be an awareness of him largely as an illustrator who created pictures of a smiling America of small towns, confident communities, and friendly people. That’s certainly the impression I got when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s and came across examples of his work, especially the covers he created for the Saturday Evening Post. No-one looked wealthy, but neither did they look poor. And they were, with  very few exceptions, white.

It would seem, judging from Norman Rockwell : At Home in Vermont, that the world he portrayed in his paintings mostly evolved during his years living in Arlington between 1939 and 1953. In her essay, “Small Town, Big Artist”, Carolyn Bauer says that the Great Depression of the 1930s had “left many Americans disillusioned about the future and yearning for a steadier past that they believed Vermont embodied…..For Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) and a small band of illustrators who gathered in Arlington, Vermont, that past was not simply romanticised, it became the foundation for a powerful visual mythology of American life that they would build”. The “small band” Bauer refers to included Mead Schaefer, John Atherton, Gene Pelham, and George Hughes. I would guess that little of their work, beyond a few magazine illustrations, is known outside America. But Atherton’s paintings. for example, could be imaginative, and showed signs of the influence of surrealism.

People were central to Rockwell’s work, and he appears to have settled easily enough into the life of Arlington for its inhabitants to be happy about being used as models for his illustrations. In “The Gossips”, a series of heads, all busy talking, either by telephone or face to face, spreads across the canvas, cleverly placed so that they give the impression of passing a story around the town. Gossip can be insidious, of course, but Rockwell suggests that it’s also likely to be light-hearted, and he carefully puts his wife and himself at the end of the line. It’s a way of suggesting that they don’t consider themselves any different or superior to the others. What is notable about this work is the skill with which Rockwell presents a variety of faces, both male and female, expressing a range of emotions, from humour to concern, and even slight shock.  

The question of Rockwell’s standing in relation to his work as art is one that never seems to get resolved. There is a suggestion that, as the Fifties developed and attention was focused more on abstract painting, and in particular the abstract expressionists, Rockwell, and by implication other illustrators, were overlooked. But were they? They continued to provide magazine covers and book illustrations which a wide audience outside a few major cities would see. Even within those cities how many people went to galleries to look at abstract paintings, as opposed to those who looked at something in a magazine or newspaper, or on a hoarding? I’m perhaps being contentious when I say that, visiting exhibitions of posters, or looking at designs for book covers (I’m thinking of someone like John Minton), I’ve often found them more interesting than many of the so-called creative works applauded by critics.   Rockwell didn’t only produce illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. He was in demand to design advertisements for Coca-Cola, Jell-O, and General Motors, among others. Thomas Denenberg in his essay, “Illustration, Art, and the Places in Between”, provides some examples of artists – Winslow Homer, Maxfield Parrish, and N.C. Wyeth, among them – who came up against that tendency to distinguish too easily between illustration and art.    

It isn’t surprising that Rockwell responded to America’s entry into the Second World War in 1941. When President Roosevelt made a wartime speech in which he referred to the four freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want -  worth fighting for, Rockwell produced paintings to match his words. There’s no way of denying that American society sometimes didn’t match up to all those high ideals, but the point was that Rockwell’s work was widely seen and helped to boost morale and persuade people to purchase war bonds. And, if you look at the painting relating to freedom of speech, it’s a particularly fine piece of work in its own right.  It’s outside the scope of this review, but after he left behind the restrictions imposed by the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell tackled some controversial subjects. There was, for example, a painting of a young black girl being escorted to school by three burly federal agents. I seem to recall reading that President Obama had it on the wall in his office.

Rockwell was also responsible for a painting of “Rosie the Riveter”, an acknowledgement of the role women were playing in wartime by taking over the jobs formerly done by men now in the armed forces. On a local level around Arlington, he showed young men called up for the army, and later pictured them being greeted as they returned. Again, it could be said that they didn’t deal with the dark side of the war, nor are there paintings, at least not in this book, of men with arms or legs missing. But in one painting, “Homecoming Marine”, a young, uniformed man clutches a Japanese flag he’s brought home as a souvenir, and is surrounded by eager listeners. There is something about his face that seems to indicate that he’ll never tell the whole of what he’d seen and done.  It’s a painting that moves out of illustration and into art.

That movement occurs in other Rockwell paintings. In “Shuffleton’s Barbershop”, the shop is closed, but through an open doorway at the rear we can see three men (there may be more we can’t see) playing musical instruments. One has a violin, one what looks like a clarinet, and a third has his back to the viewer but holds what could be a cello. They’re obviously locals who get together to play. I’m reminded of some Scandinavian paintings of similar subjects, i.e. local people involved in activities not to make money but to enjoy being in company and creating something, no matter how minor, for their own pleasure.

Another painting that embraces art as well as illustration is “Saying Grace”, where two young men in a café are gazing curiously at a well-dressed woman and her son who are praying before they consume what they’ve ordered. The detail is superb, both of the people, and the crowded room, with bags on the floor and cluttered tables. An additional canvas that transcends the supposed barrier between illustration and art is “Freedom of Worship”, which has six heads, seen in profile, and is painted in more-subdued colours than are often seen in Rockwell’s work, though the darker shading doesn’t suggest any deeper meaning other than the gravity of the scene. For me, it would be welcome in any art gallery.

I’d additionally like to include “Norman Rockwell Visits a Family Doctor” in my list of paintings I think can be taken beyond the illustration category. It shows a scene in a doctor’s consulting room. A woman sits with a baby on her knees, her husband stands behind her. A young boy sits in a chair against the far wall. There is a dog, too, presumably with the family, though it could be the doctor’s. He is leaning forward to speak to the woman. We don’t know what he is telling her, but his pose, and what we can see of his face, don’t incline me to think it’s anything very serious. It tells a story that we can develop for ourselves, and in that it puts me in mind of some Victorian paintings which likewise told stories of the kind a large number of people could relate to. Many of us have experienced those visits to a doctor and waiting to hear what he has to tell us. As with so many Rockwell paintings, the detail is excellent, from the doctor’s untidy desk to the small pictures we can see on a wall behind the standing man. 

Alexander Nemerov contributes an essay entitled, “Rock and Stone: The Life-and-Death Art of Norman Rockwell”. He focuses on two paintings, “The Craftsman” and “Kneeling Girl”, to make his case for the suggestion that “Norman Rockwell was the most earnest of artists”. In “The Craftsman” he portrays a stonemason working on a tombstone marked with the name “Norwell”. You don’t need to think too much to know where that comes from. The man is bent over some drawings, presumably relating to the stone he is working on, there are books by his side, and almost hovering in the background is a large statue of an angel.

“The Kneeling Girl” has a young girl by the side of a tombstone bearing the name “Newton”. We don’t know the relationship of the girl to whoever was buried there, so once more we can read into the picture whatever we want to. The painting clearly hints at the notion of mortality because we know that the girl will eventually die, as we all do. But as Nemerov says, Rockwell’s “cemetery is not creepy; the town is not creepy; death is not creepy”. It’s daytime when the girl is there, her school books are on the grass beside her, and a little bunch of hand-picked flowers lies in front of the tombstone. She probably isn’t aware of her own mortality. It’s peaceful.

I don’t want to close this review on a sombre note, so a few comments on some of Rockwell’s more-humorous paintings might be useful. “Income Tax” gives us a man struggling to fill in the necessary paperwork. He’s surrounded by files and scraps of paper, some torn and thrown on the floor. It’s a scene many will recognise. “April Fool” is a bizarre  and whimsical piece that might have been lifted from a child’s fantasies. “The Young Lady With the Shiner” shows a girl sitting outside the school principal’s office, smiling broadly as she waits to be questioned about how she got her black eye. “Little Girl Observing Lovers on a Train” is just that as she peers over the back of her seat and watches a couple kissing.  They’re all typically Rockwell, beautifully executed, and picking up on sights seen or experienced. I suppose “April Fool” might stand a little outside Rockwell’s usual range of subjects.  It’s an amusing curiosity, and not without interest.

Norman Rockwell : At Home in Vermont is a fascinating and instructive book. It isn’t a complete biography, as its title makes clear, and the work he did before 1939 and after 1953 isn’t covered. But insofar as it does look at a particular part of his life and painting it is informative, with well researched essays, a chronology of the years concerned, notes, and a useful bibliography. And it is full of Rockwell’s paintings, together with some by his contemporaries. I hope that, in showing the variety of his work, it will help to dispel the notion that he was little more than a mere illustrator. Yes, he was often working in circumstances where he was limited in what he could say and how he could say it. Some of his commercial work may only be of interest for its technical qualities. But the best and more original of his paintings deserve to be preserved for posterity.