Norman Rockwell

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Eric J. Segal

Working for the youth magazines, he was soon able to afford a succession of shared studios in New York City and then in New Rochelle where his family took up residence in a boarding house. Despite his steady income, Rockwell aspired to see his work on the cover of what he considered "the greatest show window in America for an illustrator," the Saturday Evening Post. Setting his sights on the Post he struggled to paint a sample image of a sophisticated society couple in the style of the Charles Dana Gibson, but soon realized that his strength lay in genre scenes, realistically rendered pictures of everyday life. He presented the Post editors with two finished canvases depicting scenes of American boyhood and several like sketches. All were approved, and within two months his first illustration for the Saturday Evening Post appeared on the cover of the issue for May 20, 1916. In his words, he "had arrived." Having broken into the field of illustration for adult magazines, Rockwell was soon submitting work to Life, Judge, Leslie's, and the Country Gentleman. By the early 1920s he would gain substantial recognition and could be selective about his assignments, working only for the most prominent magazines.

Throughout Rockwell's 47-year association with the Post as its most prominent cover illustrator, he continued to undertake a variety of assignments including calendars, books, and advertisements. Amongst his best known works are the annual Boy Scout calendars painted from 1924 to 1976 (he missed only two years); his illustrations for new editions of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1936) and Huckleberry Finn (1940); and the long series of pencil-drawn advertisements for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company done from 1950 to 1963. In 1943, the Post published his Four Freedoms--illustrating the essential principles declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt--which soon became successful war bond posters. Each of these has in common the optimism and moral salubrity Rockwell depicted throughout his seven-decade career.

Still, it was his long-standing affiliation with the Saturday Evening Post that marked Rockwell's cultural reception. Between the World Wars and under editor George Horace Lorimer, the Post advanced illustration as a particularly American art. Illustration was characterized there as speaking a common-sense visual language in opposition to modern art as a rarified and intellectualized foreign import. In short, illustration was wrapped in the magazine's conservative and isolationist positions on culture and politics. This legacy, combined with the Post's pronounced decline and unsteady revival as a discredited voice of nostalgia during the 1960s and 1970s, left Rockwell himself as a representative of obsolescence.

In 1963, Rockwell left the Post and soon expanded his repertoire of themes to encompass explicitly controversial social issues. Until this time he had applied his high-detail realism to folksy scenes--usually witty, sometimes poignant--of what appeared to be everyday life in America. As critics would note, this image of the nation's people was generally restricted to white, middle-class, and heterosexual families. Rockwell later explained, in part, that longtime Post editor Lorimer had instructed him "never to show colored people except as servants." And so they appeared throughout the Post and Rockwell's oeuvre. By contrast, Rockwell's work for Look magazine in the mid-1960s explored black-white race relations and the social turmoil which followed the civil rights movement and subsequent legislation. Best known of these is his 1964 image of Ruby Bridges escorted by deputies from the United States Marshall's office as she integrated a white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960 (Look, January 14). Thus, it was only in the last decade and a half of his life that Rockwell's own liberal views might have become readily apparent to a broad public.