Norman Rockwell Documentary

support for American masters is made possible in part by the park foundation dedicated to education and quality television and by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts additional funding for American masters is provided by Rosalind P Walter Jack Rudin the Blanche and Irving Lori foundation the Andre and Elizabeth Curtis Foundation and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you [Music] when you look at Norman Rockwell it's almost like being Gulliver going to their planet and looking kind of miniature fantasy world he kind of created a mythical wonderful land of childhood innocence and exuberance [Music] Rockwell's better than any other American artist in history painted the American Dreams better than anyone [Music] welcome to Norman's place come in and join me and come in around to year right join us here in front of Main Street in front of the world of Norman Rockwell I almost by accident was in Stockbridge Massachusetts and went to see the Norman Rockwell Museum in a way I was actually more interested in seeing the Robert Stern building than the holdings but I was there and I walked in and it was for me like discovering a whole new planet I had to confess that these pictures were riveting [Music] I really believe that the first memories of rockwell in my life were almost subliminal they were just a part of what it was like to grow up in America he was already becoming part of the American fabric this is his Main Street this is his bank [Music] the butcher shop where he buys his food we talk about things in terms of Norman Rockwell well this is no Norman Rockwell you know I don't think we're in Kansas anymore toto I suppose he's about as much apple pie as anybody in this country mr. Norman Rockwell [Applause] I don't think there's any other artists in the world his work is seen within his own society with the same continuous affection you go to him like somebody going to fond and friendly and utterly benign uncle before we go any further I do want to thank you on behalf of this country for the wonderful wonderful paintings you have furnished you tell me how many covers did you do for The Saturday Evening Post well I never counted them but some people have counted they count up to 360 odd [Music] he was a myth maker he made miss that people who were not concerned with art as such could believe in he captured us in a blink of his artistic eye he just sort of captured the way we were and the way we should always be they Locke's Lodge through which dreams of projector [Music] the story of my life Rockville once said is really the story of my pictures and how I made them because in one way or another everything I have ever seen or done has gone into my pictures [Music] my brother said recently when he was interviewed about his own work and somebody tried to put on him something about simple Norman Rockwell he just said he's a lot more complicated he was a lot more complicated than that our view of Rockwell is characterized by a great longing for simplicity and the mistake we make about Rockwell is to say that X defines this man the work may tell the story of the man but not as we expect Rockwell became a legend with images of the familiar and everyday reassuring images that seemed to say little of change or struggle in fact Rockwell's life held much of both and in the end he painted that story too he went beyond our expectations you would think that he probably grew up on a farm somewhere in the Midwest now but he didn't he he grew up in New York City born there I wasn't I'd street and Amsterdam Avenue he was a New York City boy he said that when he was six years old he used to go up and sit on the roof of the boardinghouse they lived in and watched the Irish and the German gangs fight it out with bicycle chains they did go out to the country in the summers for vacations and I think he probably developed some idyllic feeling about that maybe I don't know then they moved out to Mamaroneck the family lived in a succession of boarding houses Rockwell's father worked as an office manager his mother was often ill Rockwell would later write of himself as a boy I didn't think too much of myself a lump a long skinny nothing a beanpole without the beans all I had was my ability to draw I just guess from what he said to me and what I read in his own autobiography that that he spent a fairly lonely childhood and that he did not have a close relationship with his parents and that his peer world was the important world to him and the fact that he was not a good athlete and that he did not shine as a scholar but that he always drew and he garnered the admiration of his peers through his drawing were you a university man yourself I want the two years of a Maryland high school yeah two years of my own I can give you the chair I thought I heard my grandmother say the MHS won a game today with a repo and a rifle and a repo rifle rum booms in a rat trap bigger than the cat track system bar on our neck high school rock his ninth grade principal call him in the end-of-year said rockwell you got to get serious this thing of art school you got to make up your mind art school or high school knowing that he would decide high school and my father said fine I'll go to art school he was always aimed at illustration his father apparently used to read Dickens and used to copy illustrations out of magazines illustration was part of the excitement of his own growing up it was the one visual medium that everybody which was tuned didn't do there was no television illustration was the visual sort of a vehicle in which these stories were brought to life and so as as they call it the Golden Age of illustration Rockwell enters art students League not to learn how to be a great painter and the manner of the ashcan school he goes straight to the illustrator classes my father went to art school and then by the time he was 16 he started professionally illustrating not only was he talented but he had the ability to knock this stuff out very early and he was art editor of boy's life at the age of 19 think of it when he was 22 he took some things that threw the Saturday Evening Post which to him in which to most other people was the peak of illustration he tells a wonderful story of his own awkwardness having a special box built for himself to carry his work down to show it to the editors of the post and it looked like some kind of funeral contraption and going in and showing his work and being very surprised when they took it this would be sort of like getting an Oscar the first time you made a movie Norman you've been identified with The Saturday Evening Post for many many years when did you do your first cover for them well the original of the first cover I did I don't know before you were born or not 16 and this is the original of it in those days that you only read in black - ility mass rapid color printing is what made him and The Saturday Evening Post and colleagues and looking all the rest of impossible he rises just at the moment that America still wants painted drawn in other words made effigies of daily life rather than simply photograph forms he did have certain subjects that he loved he loved kids I think it was a great deal of autobiographical stuff in dealing with kids all the time you don't get a sense when you read Norman Rockwell's autobiography that he had a kind of idyllic barefoot boy with cheek of tan upbringing and so for many years for maybe the first 15 years of his career he kind of created a mythical wonderful land of mischievous boys and dogs usually that had one brown eye and as that faker is it real in some emotional way Rockwell paints an emotional truth and that is he's a city boy from New York who clearly did not like that place and I think what he didn't like about it was a kind of sense of emotional violence that robbed him of a childhood Rockwell's remembered one image of the city that overshadowed all others as a child he saw a drunken woman beating a man with an umbrella he sees her screaming as she stumbles through a lot all of Rockwell's art until the 1960s is running away from whatever it is he saw in that vacant lot [Music] Rockwell's said against that image of the city i set the country the view of life i communicated my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly I paint life as I would like it to be [Music] in a sense he was the dream of what we wanted to be rather than the reality nobody of any real sophistication ever thought that we were in fact what Norman Rockwell was portraying but virtually everybody thought it would be nice if we were what Norman Rockwell was betraying Rockwell seemed to be everywhere from magazine covers to Boy Scout calendars to advertisements everybody knew there was magic in Rockwell's brush people followed illustrators the way they subsequently followed movie stars and Norman Rockwell became the sort of superstar you know the Clark Gable great great performer in that in that arena Rockwell lived in the world of his work among other commercial artists in New Rochelle a New York suburb where many successful illustrators had settled that was where Rockwell met Irene O'Connor my mother was a second wife his first wife was a schoolteacher who he claimed whether this is true or not that in the enthusiasm of having been picked by the post in 1922 he went back and invited this pretty schoolteacher who was it living the same boarding house as he lived in in nourish shell pasture to Marion he later use described it as not terribly close marriage and that both of them lived a fairly twenties free and easy lifestyle in the suburbia of nourish shell and having affairs with other people Rockwell's traveled widely during the 1920s without Irene he wandered the world North Africa Central America and Europe [Music] in his early work rockwell often explored the dreams of youth [Music] the first painting I purchased was Daniel Boone it was probably the first painting ever purchased in my life a writer trying to find his next story here's a super imposition of a plane's menorah or a Daniel Boone character you know kind of like in smoke just over the kid's head as he's imagining the story he's trying to tell conjuring an image and then that image is going to find its way to the paper [Music] at the end of the 1920s Rockwell's marriage with irene ended he got divorced and he thought oh i'm gonna live the life of the bachelor and sometime soon after he met this cute Mary Barstow who had was just a year out of college 14 years younger than him and I think a week later got engaged and I do remember that my father was always mildly chagrin that his hometown newspaper the New York Times but when they got married Mary Barstow California socialite marries artist the new decade the 1930s brought stability at home and soon a family Jarvis Tom and Peter but at work Rockwell was still Restless he was working for a predictable market and knew what the public wanted but he also had endless aching doubts about his own persona as an artist one of the hard things to realize is that Norman Rockwell never painted pictures to be seen you know when you think about artists you think about them painting pictures they're gonna hang on the wall hang in a museum or hang somewhere Norman Rockwell was selling reproduction rights that's what he was doing they were painted for a camera and they were painted for color separations and they were painted for high-speed printing presses at a creative stalemate Rockwell took off again for Europe settling with his family in Paris Mary wrote home that after two years of struggling Norman knows what he wants to do which is experiment with all sorts of things to become an artistic artist instead of a commercial one throughout Rockwell's career he has these wild engagements with the modernist spirit he tells about going to Paris falling madly in love with dynamic symmetry and painting a cover and bringing it home and showing it to Lorimer the long-term editor of the post alarm are saying now no more of that Norman no more of that [Music] he had the ambitions of transcending the traditions of popular illustration I mean I guess it's almost the equivalent of a crackerjack journalist who longs to be a writer of the Great American Novel but has to grind out his copy every week and feels as though he's been defeated he was very intense about his work and could get very upset and then he had this perfectionism as I can remember my mother saying Norman for goodness sake it's done stop it that detail isn't gonna make any difference he'd say no no no no I got to get just this little detail right Rockwell's work in the 1930s revealed little of either his own crisis or the nation's I was selling The Saturday Evening Post from door to door now I was living in a town in North Jersey down on the Passaic River the Depression had really hit hard there people came to the door men in undershirts women who were breathing beer fumes you know people who hadn't worked worked in years and looking at this Norman Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post you wanna buy a Saturday they'd say don't you have true story don't we have true detective you know they wanted to read about Vice adultery and see pictures of mutilated bodies at the morgue then I'd hold this thing up this charming idealized the America that Rockwell was drawing and Oh was hard work after I grew up and thought about this I realized what he was doing you know you know it was like a propaganda except it was nice propaganda he was able to present an American and quite strong popular images not rah-rah tub-thumping ones that the ones that came sort of that got under your skin of certain ideas of American mutuality American idealism American virtue above all it harks back to an original Puritan promise the idea that America ought to be the community within the city on the hill it's an America that never completely existed but which is always surging up in American dreams [Music] if ever Rockwell's vision of america met the real one it was in Arlington Vermont where Rockwell moved at the end of the 1930s [Music] he came to Ireland at a time in his life when he was looking for a new way so maybe some new energy and new scenery he came originally to buy a vacation home for his family and apparently he just fell in love with the beauty the serenity the peacefulness the simple way of life that a small Vermont community would offer a person [Music] lived here in town for 14 years we knew him as a friend of the neighbor not so much as a famous artist he used over 200 people in town as models myself included first time I met Norman was at a basketball game in the Arlington high school gym we had begun the third quarter and I suddenly wanted a coke so when I turned to my father and said dad I want a coke he said to me they only serve cokes during the half and this man said to me here have my coke and my parents turned around and thanked Norman and introduced me to Norman and he looked at me and he said how would you like to pose for me I don't think that I knew that he was famous in our town at that time there were several artists who did post covers and it was just kind of normal living I remember my father getting phone calls from Norman sometimes at 3 o'clock in the morning and they would go over there and help and discuss my father is meet Schaefer he also did covers and Illustrated for The Saturday Evening Post they were almost like brothers they would talk over their work which was very consuming all four of them Norman my father John a certain and George Hughes they lived and breathed their work he was a workaholic he worked seven days a week one of the things I remember is little family fights because he would try to go out to work on Christmas Day Afternoon and my mother would say you don't work on Thanksgiving in Christmas you may work seven days a week with that and but he would somehow figure out a way to sneak out there and work and there seems to be an emotional deepening of his work in Arlington perhaps it was the fact that he was living in a community where the war touched individuals so strongly and certainly it's the heart of the Willie Gillis series which I think is one of the most interesting documents of the second world war ever produced he created a character Willie Gillis and took it through something like 911 covers and Willie Gillis is never shooting a gun and never firing terrible things don't happen to Willie but the ordinary adventures of life happened at the same time that he's connected to his hometown rather than dealing with great events and great people this is not the Movietone news this is what happens to your son your brother your boyfriend when he goes off in the service poor little Willie Gillis was a buck private Norman he envisioned a very glamorous woman being his girlfriend and he chose me one time he had a bed all made up and I was there in curlers which I didn't like at the time but I was supposed to be dreaming of Willie Gillis his pictures were all over the bed and they were sort of looking down on me at the foot of the bed there was an envelope I have just received a letter from him Lee Shafer my whole address on this when that got published I received mail from all over the world from servicemen my mother wasn't exactly happy but I was oh I went it was great he did a great deal of patriotic painting in World War two but he only did one painting of people fighting didn't try to pretend that that wasn't going on it was a conscious act in his painting and also as part of his wanting to be loved I mean I don't think it went so far that it falsified things in his painting but he really did like to be liked I remember a February and I remember sitting in a big chair and the fire was raging in the fireplace because it was very cold that night and norman had received some mail not a criticism exactly to the painting but somebody noticed something that was not technically perfect just some little thing but he was grow they're upset about it I remember my father saying what does that got to do with painting oh just forget it you know and he said I don't want to forget it I want to become a household name well with that they just my father was what do you want that for what I mean and I remember John Atherton was really IBT they really were rather upset with him I turned around to all of them and I took my glass and i clinked it to his and I said go for it and he did [Music] [Music] Norman Rockwell's creation of the Four Freedoms was a project that he very much wanted to do as a consequence of the United States being involved in World War two he was 43 at the time too old to serve so he did work with an idea and that was the fact that President Roosevelt at the time had made a presentation to Congress then future days which we seek to make secure we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms in the world he did have this sort of thing of the big painting he wanted to do something for the war which will secure to every nation his freedom from fear you hear the story of Rockwell waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning at the beginning of World War two just obsessed by Franklin Roosevelt's concept of the Four Freedoms and can't get back to sleep and is literally driven to create something to match the eloquence of Franklin Roosevelt's words world war two was a real turning point in Norman Rockwell's career he suddenly got caught up in the war and it became personal it was no longer the subject of his work simply how do I please my client it was much more what is this really about and how do I make a contribution to it I remember his going down to Washington and trying to get the war bond drive to buy them to sell war bonds and my father went with him and they were very dejected and they said it just wasn't it didn't go and Mary Rockwell was the one that spoke up why don't you take them into the Saturday Evening Post and see what they had to say about it and it was a go by in the hills of Vermont the key of the greatest financial undertaking in the history of the world after The Saturday Evening Post bought the Four Freedoms the government left on the bandwagon and used the paintings for the war effort neighbors come to the home of Norman Rockwell to pose for posters for the second war bond Drive this one freedom from one first of America's basic for freedoms the Four Freedoms are an interesting exercise in peace and this is maybe the first expression of Norman Rockwell social conscience coming to the surface freedom from fear and this picture seems to me to be a fervent prayer that war never touches these children I actually used a Rockwell in a movie and when I made Empire the son I used a picture of two parents tucking their child into bed at night i reenact adapt picture with my actors when they put Jim to bed in the first act of Empire of the Sun [Music] and Jim later on takes that rock well the picture of that rock well from Life magazine cut out in his little suitcase when he is taken off into a Japanese prisoner of war camp that painting almost became a betrayal of what through art and radio and literature he was taught to believe that his parents would always be there for him and in this case they weren't and they couldn't be Norman you have any idea of how many copies have been made of those paintings I don't really know I know it runs in the billions of minions [Music] freedom from what would have to be the most famous painting that rock will ever did what you're getting is a kind of virtuous abundance there is the desire for continuity which is expressed in the generations of the family the absence of interior decoration plainness of the light the way it falls what rock wall is talking about in this picture is a direct link which has never been eroded back to the original Puritans the Puritans come to America not in the expectation of getting hugely rich and getting free there's very little drama in the picture everything is playing everything is explicit everything is candid and that's because it's all under the eye of the Lord and on the north I really get choked up sometimes looking at some of his work especially these Four Freedoms they're absolutely marvelous perception is reality for for whoever wants to look through a certain lens and if you want to look through someone else's lens like Rockwell's the important thing is that it did become reality for a lot of people therefore freedoms or poignant images and they did focus our attention on what we valued or believed we valued in those terrible early 40s he finished the Four Freedoms and then soon after succeeded in burning up his own studio by knocking out a pipe onto the cushion [Music] maybe it was a recognition of the self destruction that is in any hardest that especially comes up after you've done something particularly hard and particularly long in public Rockwell treated the event as a humorous tale of domestic adventure [Music] the fire consumed props and costumes that had been the foundation of Rockwell's work when that happened he lost a collection of a lifetime which in a way had tethered him to kind of costume pieces and turned him more in the direction of documentary scenes that dealt with the world around him and the here and now it's just Norman Rockwell coming to grips with what his world looks like [Music] Rock welded a series for the post visiting places in the everyday life of America from a small-town newspaper to a country doctor's office his paintings went out on location The Saturday Evening Post was under new leadership the editors pushed Rockwell to explore a more modern style [Music] when I was a kid in Australia when saw illustrations by Rockville because when saw The Saturday Evening Post I don't remember having any doubt when I saw Rockville's depictions of middle-class water and life in America of that was what America was really really like they were portraitures of America and Americans without cynicism [Music] I was raised in the late 40s and early 50s you know at a time when I was feeling safe and comfortable and protected I had bad news censored by my parents and the media in those days you know wasn't as outspoken to show every you know flaw and disaster and tragedy as they seemed to rush to like almost exploit today so I grew up in a very innocent world [Music] I look back at these paintings as America the way it could have been the way someday it may again be but certainly the way it was right after the Second World War and that was that time it was it was about eros it was about nice people it was about good things [Music] there was a sort of idealism I mean we believed that we were as good as we told ourselves and we and he told us we were good but certainly the James Stewart it's a wonderful life was Rocco you know this guy who has an angel of inevitable an angel of awesome has all these friends he's holding his little daughter and suddenly turn it into a Rockwell painting and you can see exactly how it would look it's Rockwell there's really only one virtue in Rockwell and that's tolerance there's that the famous painting that is always used by people who advocate the Rockwell as a kind of conservative icon it's called saying grace and the general presumption of course that this is Rockwell advocating family values and obedience to Authority and traditional religion and public prayer in fact what the painting is about is that all the people around them are tolerating this that's the real subject is the audience and what Rockwell is telling us is that okay let them go ahead and do that that's the whole moral of everything that you that you see in Rockwell it's always the idea of people approving of other people for me many of his paintings were really about citizenship citizenship in the nation and citizenship in the home [Music] the minute you saw a Norman Rockwell penis you felt good he was a Salesman he could sell things because he had this this dream the advertising world when I first came into the business was the world of Norman Rockwell people only smiled [Music] I connect to the fact that every painting you know is a story that can be told again and again and you never get tired of hearing the story and you never get tired of the interpretation always being pretty much the same the same way a movie it's not an esoteric and you know you know a movie or it's not too cerebral a movie is a movie it tells one story and that story can repeat as many times you see it and Rockwell is still making and paint his paintings were full of dialogue full of monologue it was just one look which is speak volumes the mature work process for Norman Rockwell is kind of complicated first he gets the idea then he starts making little bitty sketches of what the idea might be like and then I used to take him in those days down to Philadelphia and then I generally I act him out more than the show was sketched they okay it and then I go back to the to the studio he has an assistant who then will photograph the model in the position that he wants and if he can do it he'll photograph the model with the background he wants as well he worked almost exclusively from life until about 1937 and then he began to go for photography in a big way not because it made it easier or cheaper but because it enabled him to do things he couldn't do without the camera made it possible for him to catch action the camera made it possible for him to look down on a scene or to look up at something it expanded his options enormous Lee I used photographs a great deal you know it cause you have a person doing something you can take fifty pictures of him and then you pick one that expresses the idea pass one of the final steps is then to project the photograph onto a large sheet of canvas and to quite literally trace it then he would produce a full charcoal sketch which was really a detailed careful drawing of what the cover would be it was a process of painting by which you went very carefully step by step through building up to the final act of painting but then in the final act of painting there would come moments when things didn't work out right and he would make changes he would even sometimes reject and start over again there was one the facts of life which if I remember I think he spent 11 months doing it repainted it three times had to take out bank loans because he just stopped earning money for 11 months well he tried to get this painting right every time he sent a picture down to the post he would be in a state of jitters that they might reject it when he coming by the time I was conscious of anything at this he was so successful that the idea that they would reject something is sort of nonsensical but he was petrified then I deliver and then I had an old model used to say to me did you get to check see how I got to check that's the thing my boy get the check you see then I get paid for and then I have to think of another one he was about pleasing in the boss if the boss wanted to be charmed and amused that's what he did and that's usually what the post was looking for he used the family a lot it wasn't until I became much older that I realized that he also ideas came from the family he did that diving board cover the summer after I went through a whole thing of getting up my nerve to jump out of the window of the covered bridge that was a sort of a sign of being a big boy that you had the nerve to jump into the river from the window of the covered bridge they ran this board from the top of the balcony railing over - they took pops easel and wounded up the top and put the board across the top and this hurt tied it and then said crawl out there and look frightened I was frightened before I crawled out there let alone how I felt once I got out there I have read in my adult life it's quite a surprise that he said that I was his favorite child model that he could get me to do things with my face that just delighted him [Music] generally he had a little sketch and he tell me the story about that sketch for example the little girl the black eye well he really set that one up well he said look you're victorious in this picture you're the little girl who beat the boys and that was really beyond my imagination but he said you're gonna grin just think about what its gonna feel like to to be the victor and so when I sat down to do it he literally got down on the floor started pounding the floor with his hands and kept saying come on come on come on I want a smile and he just started cheering me on and pretty soon I was just able to let go and out came that marvelous grin raka was an actor I think and I think Rocco was kind of a pretty good performer himself he'd liked his face you know he enjoyed that he looked a lot like the subjects he was painting he didn't look like a California surfer god knows what he would have paid it he looks like that he looked just like that kind of Eastern Midwestern face that that his vision of America and Americans and I think he painted him that's why he so often put himself in his own pictures he began to really focus on what life was in America and this seemed to be a happy time in his life he really wanted to capture America living a Wonderful Life and reflect that back to the people of the nation I can remember looking at those covers and you know when you talk about Rockwell's obsession with kids it's really about the kind of historical idea about democracy which is that democracy is always about the promise of its youth you know in Rockwell's pictures that was the culture was about being okay to the kids Rockwell's always issues permissions indignities and improprieties are always forgiven pictured the run away with his little bindle he's been collected by the policeman and buys him a soda fountain so he's sitting there with the nice policeman he forgives kids for messing around with I think with the implicit presumption that they're going to still mess around when they're grown-up [Music] Rockwell's dealt with all extremes he dealt with kids he dealt with loneliness that wonderful picture of the little girl - staring at herself in the mirror sitting like this for their knees together he dealt with every touchstone in life and he would make a meal out of it Norman Rockwell was a storyteller I mean if he was anything he was a storyteller and always full of details so that you could reinforce the story if you think of something like the Rembrandt the great Rembrandt of the prodigal son in Russia you know the father with his hands on the young man's shoulders and these two hands tell the whole story and when Norman deals with a comparable subject the separation of the father and son when the father is sitting there his son his sons going off to college it's not like that but it's so specific you know you know everything about the father you know he's a farmer the top of his head has been shielded by a big hat so he's lighter up here than he is down here you look at the sons awkward brand-new clothes and you notice a red flag that they're gonna have to use to stop the train to send the son away it's only when you collectively look at all those details that what seems to be a kind of perky picture becomes terribly sad you have to stop this life and that boy has to go away from his father and his father is going to feel terrible for a long time and you could cry I don't think that particularly his critics have looked hard enough at these works which always reward looking hard I think it's wonderful how he he actually you know you source light without creating too much of a contrast between the source and the subject so I thought that was real brave for an American illustrator who wasn't just willing to front light everything he had some of the qualities of a well in certain paintings like Vermeer practically like the barbershop where you look into this darkened space and there at the back illuminated some kind of music is being being played the transparency of the window seems to invite us to readily move inside behind the picture plane where old men are playing music at night and you can almost hear them in the stillness of this picture [Music] Norman was never complacent in my experience he was never self-satisfied he used to show me work he had done and point out what was wrong with it he'd say oh every time I see this thing I wish I had done so and so I remember one of the case in points was a family going to church on Sunday morning but the family is a kind of a caricature of a family I mean they've got funny noses and they're walking in a funny kind of disney-esque sort of way and yet the background of these houses is a beautiful piece of landscape painting and Heba moaned the fact that he had treated the family in this way he wished he'd treated them with a seriousness that the rest of this cover had the why is one of the charges were always hit with of the worse very much like Norman Rockwell and you know I don't take that as such a bad charge although the critics love to throw that I think a lot of his work is very sweet very kind of almost Disney if I'd which I think puts off a lot of serious students of art but I think if you see beyond that there is a remarkable intensity that he brought to American life that do you know nobody else has done when you look at Rockwell's I mean the thing that I have always found so interesting about them is that when he's doing ideas he's really awful I think in other words when he's doing like freedom from Walt you know when he's doing sort of concepts when he's doing really historical moments and I that's why you know as I call Rockwell a democratic history painting even though they're domestic scenes they're historical moments he's talking about how history happens right down here on the street everybody's always engaged in something to do with the daily life of the Republic there's a fabulous picture of 1949 which is one of the watershed moments in American history it shows a man installing TV antenna on his roof but the roof that he's putting it on is a gable of a Victorian house so it just quietly suggests the contrast between old and new and then you notice that it occupies the same position as the church steeples do in the landscape in the background so is this the beginning of a new religion it's the transformation from BC to AD before television - after television and it just soars forward to the world we live in the picture that most characterizes Rockwell's view of history is this picture I think it's called moving day or something which a giant moving van is trying to make its way down a little teeny alley and people are hanging out the windows and stuff I mean Farakka is just always this kind of tumult of things changing and people are looking and people are talking and all this stuff is going on and to me that's what Rockwell is about this is a specific moment of historical transition for rockwell himself the early 50s marked the end of his time in Arlington despite the peace and stability he had found there the years had not been so easy for his wife Mary my mother was a extremely warm person she took on herself the extremely difficult job you know one year out of college and she marries somebody who has for 14 years been a well-known artist and takes on the job of doing all the work for him bringing up the kids doing the taxes taking care of the house everything my father was earning by the mid 40s early 50s a lot of money but my mother was still expected to do the taxes and it took her having a nervous breakdown for him to realize you could hire a tax accountant I know that Mary was very troubled she was extremely intelligent person and maybe she wanted her own identity that's the way we all discussed it among ourselves it created tensions in the family create a lot of tensions over the fact that I think my father felt that the public image ought to be something like his painting and it wasn't eventually she cracked under the pressure of all this and became an alcoholic and then had nervous breakdowns and I think tried to commit suicide and had to be off and on committed to mental institutions and in fact the reason we moved to Stockbridge was because there was a very good Riggs Foundation which is a psychiatric mental institution and she just needed to be near near it [Music] Rockwell's was already 59 years old when he moved his family to Stockbridge Massachusetts yet it became the town with which he is most identified it presented still this fantasy of a very clean and very white Americana in which family values were preserved it also was based in some part on fantasies about colonial America there was that sense of purity everybody was prim they lived in little white painted houses and there was absolutely no social unrest Norman Stockbridge appears to be a most pleasant town and I know that personally from driving through it do all the Rockwell share your affection for Stockbridge oh yes very much thank you this is married my wife good evening mrs. blackwell yeah good evening mrs. Rockwell with Norman doing all his work at home does he bother you or do you bother him the other the usual biographic statement about Rockwell is that he moves to Stockbridge for the sake of his second wife who entered treatment there for alcoholism but and in fact Rockwell was ridden throughout his life by depressive episodes that he only began treating in earnest when they moved to Stockbridge Rockwell made friends outside the art world one was Erik Erikson a famous psychologist connected to the Austin Riggs Center they met every Tuesday at the red line and had lunch and just had a good time Erickson was sort of a spiritual support he was helpful to rock for when he felt under pressure and they also had a friendship I think he also saw took care of the whole family in a way he was over a family doctor Norman had a long long term relationship with Riggs and he used to pay for some of the fees with charcoal portraits of the various doctors Eric among them there was no outward sign of any mental upset there were certainly mood swings possibly some manic possibly some depression I don't know the question that Norman Rockwell's kept asking himself well was he merely an illustrator or was he a genuine artist and I think he always yearned to be an artist for the Capitol a the kind that went into the museums as opposed to covers of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post he decided that my brothers should learn to be artists I remember my father distinctly saying at one point I want you guys to be serious artists not a commercial artist like me and I want you to be the real thing he'd never called himself an artist he always called himself an illustrator he refused to be called an artist I feel the kind of thing I like to do I know it isn't it isn't the highest form of art I love to tell stories and pictures I say well the people laugh although they cry when they see it that isn't what a fine art man goes for but I go for it apparently his approach to that early points was popular so he kept getting commissioned to do more and more he got sick of it at some point and one day I said to me said gee I could start all over again I would paint like Picasso he was bored or frustrated like one day he slammed the door which was unlike him I said what's the matter said 35 years of boyce codd counters I've had it so I said why don't you start by me you know you don't need the money anymore so no I can't you know he was sort of into this so much he couldn't stop at the peak of his success rockwell played to his public image at every opportunity it's an interesting custom the way they decorate you when you come to Hawaii they don't even ask whether you have he traveled the world in a promotion for Pan Am and he lent his name to a correspondence course the famous artist school the idea of the famous artist school was that you could have a mail-order art school and of course the use of his name was absolutely key to the success of that whole project it was in a sense misleading let me say to some of us because it did imply that Norman Rockwell is gonna pay attention to you and in fact of course there was no way he was gonna pay attention to you I have a sort of books myself of the pauses I never took the cause but I wish I had I'd be better off well he became a marketable the quantity so to speak over and above his work he became a kind of a living monument to himself in his own time and I think he rather enjoyed that he was very modest about it but I think he enjoyed it Tony yeah I'm told that you're the writing member of the family is that right yes mr. Murrow I want to be a writer right now I'm helping pop with his autobiography it's gonna be a long one because he's 65 and you liked his self image and he liked being famous and then the pipe remember was very much part of his self-image I mean I can remember in sometime in the 50s going to a play in New York on Broadway and I became conscious as he did that there were sort of a few people over there who suddenly recognized him and he suddenly pulled out his pipe and put it in his mouth to make it clear who he was and his public persona of being the folksy nice everyday person was in some conflict with the intensity of the perfectionist and workaholic and lover of great painting I want to kind of put you on a spot I'm going to ask you who is your favorite artist well of all time there's no doubt Rembrandt you know I mean usually I mean to me a Rembrandt painting any of his paintings they're like beautiful symphony I mean they have these great deep notes he understood humanity and he's just the greatest he just adored Rembrandt I remember one of my first memories of a museum was something like 1946 there was a show at the Metropolitan and I remember my intense embarrassment because he got up so close to the Rembrandt's so intensely pointing at the guard told him to get away he had this funny way of putting pictures in a picture and then making the picture more alive than the people in the picture just the intensity of his love of the art of painting I think fed things into his painting which wouldn't been there otherwise one of the ones that is both most obvious and most fun is the Rosie the Riveter in which the poses a direct take from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling [Music] one of the interesting blurs and the boundaries between rockwell and the presumably high art of the museum's is in a self-portrait he did tacked up all around the canvas our self-portraits by the old masters he puts up a Rembrandt adorn a Picasso and a van Gogh these are all the great people of painting he is putting himself in relationship to them for once in his life he's saying these are the people I compared myself with one of the things that strikes me about that picture is that somehow it's not about him it's about an image of him you know he had a wonderful face a very expressive face and the face in that triple self-portrait there's no face there at all it's just a banality it's completely devoid of the rubber mask that was his face you never see his eyes in that image the glasses have the light hitting so you don't see his eyes so the only seat place you see his eyes is where he has been has drawn them in for you he's saying I'm different from what you think I am [Music] Norman Rockwell's for me and for lots of people of my generation was just completely out of bounds I mean it was almost a dirty word in terms of the history of art he really came a cropper during the 1950's when the Abstract Expressionists were in ascendancy in the New York art market and when showing ones emotion and one's bodily movements visible visibly on canvas what was what you were supposed to do as a painter [Music] it's quite apparent that he was in touch with the history of modern modern art there is a famous Norman Rockwell in which he reproduces a painting by Jackson Pollock we doesn't exactly reproduce it invents his own Jackson Pollock he couldn't have painted it the way Pollock did using the whole arm I mean this is a wrist painting notwithstanding it's very very convincing I guess Rockwell had take on the greatest living American artists by being the greatest living American artist at that point himself and so there's a little bit of a conflict he tried to do something more free his second wife she was not a professional artist but she painted a lot and she was totally free and uninhibited and could just sit down and whip out a portrait not a realistic portrait just and he was very envious to see god I wish I could do like Mary just sit down and paint he couldn't do it in 1959 Mary Rockwell died unexpectedly of a heart attack the children were grown and Rockwell was left on his own about a year after my mother died out of some sense of either boredom or whatever my father started taking a a poetry course with this cute Molly punished new at 65 had just retired from being English teacher for 35 years of Milton Academy and I remember spending the latter part of the summer with sitting my wife saying look dad come on ask her to marry you for goodness sake don't be frightened you're in love with her she's obviously interested in you and so then he married his third wife oh I think she changed him dramatically a old friend of his may need to remark that thank goodness Molly made him a liberal because I don't know if he had any particular political affiliations before but Molly came in and really he did become a liberal she did change him because he would never do paintings of social issues which might make anybody annoyed before that he always said I will not disturb my audience and she had a very strong social conscience and the painting the problem we all live with was probably done because Molly made it clear to him that that he should be doing this sort of thing [Music] his famous segregation painting I think is a profound work and one of his greatest paintings where his own point of view is what a sweet flavoring of America was suddenly tempered by what existed in the real world and he decided to start painting about that [Music] the painting was based on the true story of ruby bridges the six-year-old girl who integrated in New Orleans school in 1960 [Music] we hardly ever until the 1960 see black people in Norman Rockwell's work and we might be able to account for the latter by the fact that The Saturday Evening Post made that part of their editorial policy they actually told Norman Rockwell that they didn't want him to use black people on his covers unless they were in a subservient position I asked Rockwell why there were never blacks in his painting and he said because editors don't want it he had worked for years for an editor named Ben Hibbs at the Saturday you can post and the standing order was don't put black people in your paintings it makes people feel uneasy Rockwell cracked through these boundaries of what Americans like to see reflected about themselves and in the 1960s especially he did pictures of civil rights activists in the south who had been shot or injured and these are appallingly true documents that suddenly speak about the ugly facts of America as opposed to the whitewash candy box images that he had painted before [Music] [Music] it's quite an extraordinary conversion there was a side of him it was quite different than I expected his banter was about things like what a jerk he thought Richard Nixon was how there was nothing good to find in the Vietnam War why were we doing this he said that when he painted the Four Freedoms during the during World War two he believed everything in that painting and he said I could not do that painting again because I thought all those things were going to prevail after the war and then other things happened and he said I feel sad about that and I think the reason he felt sad about it was he wanted it to be I mean if if we believed a myth if he engendered a myth in the populous I think to a large extent through most of his life he believed it more than we do by the 1960s Rockwell was painting for a different audience and new clients many of his illustrations during this period were commissioned by Look magazine Norman Rockwell didn't ever really decline popularity but the main machine that carried him did The Saturday Evening Post became less and less interesting to people Life magazine took over Look magazine took over these were both magazines about the events of the day and they were full of all sorts of stuff that people had to face whether they wanted to or not and in that process Norman lost his major market he went on and he did a lot of other new things you know he worked for NASA he got very much involved with presidential portraits and and what these presidential faces were presented to us as images of who we were and that thing so he shifted and he tried to find new markets and he was so preeminent in his field as an illustrator that he was still much sought-after Norman Rockwell Dean of American artists in Alma's stickler for true to life color that's the reason I took my time and picking my first color TV I like to show it to you and here it is my new Zenith colour TV when a Norman Rockwell portrait of you and your cat in the Purina cat food $100,000 double sweepstakes lateness creates pretty much a paparazzo he abandoned the club of oh I'm just Norman Rockwell going around collecting old uniforms and painting pictures of ordinary Americans all of a sudden he's flying around the world looking at Peace Corps projects hanging out in Hollywood he just moved into this new celebrity culture [Music] he's not paying kids no swimming he's spending Jack Kennedy's painting astronauts he's painting Peace Corps workers he's dealing with them at a level of generalization that he has never dealt with before he's also dealing with ideas he's not dealing with narratives but I just want to personify that people are riveted but what they are is we are reflected in their faces and they represent the people's the earth and if we could only all get together everything would be hunky-dory Rockwell thought that by illustrating these big issues he was somehow establishing himself as a major painter he was already a major painter I mean he mistook the idea of great art and high art they're not the same thing he wanted to paint high art which means that it's abstracted that it's about ideas in a sense in his own primitive way Rockwell's late of his all conceptual you know it's an illustration of the Golden Rule you know it's got text on it just like conceptual art has although he would never mostly admit it he really did want the admiration of the fine arts world he really did feel that he was good he once told me when he had just been in Amsterdam and he said I got the curator of the Rembrandt Museum to let me go into Rembrandt's studio at sunset and I went in and I said Rembrandt I'm Norman Rockwell and what do you think of me they stop they sit and I didn't get an answer Rockwell's may have felt that the bunk Euler pipe-smoking painter was a trap particularly when he was passed over for the conventional art world honors on the other hand it must have been a tremendously reassuring thing to have been he was greatly honored at the end of his life presidents and nabobs of all sorts visited him the town of Stockbridge had a parade in his honor he made a fabulous living at this - until the very end of his life so it must be kind of like being a movie star in a way oh I can't stand it all the pressures of this terrible life on the other hand there are all the wonderful things that go with it he was a pro you know he was a guy that that did what he did better than anybody else and was paid more than anybody else for it he also was a very kind man had a very generous man I don't know that I ever heard anything mean said about Norman Rockwell by anybody who knew him [Music] in his late paintings rockwell continued to explore the story of America its past and future his final work John Sargent and chief conquer pot was left unfinished on his easel on November 8th 1978 Rockwell died in Stockbridge at the age of 84 I do remember the last time I saw Norman it was in Stockbridge I came up to visit I think he had been ill you know one stroke and Molly his third wife said to me oh you going he'll love to see you but don't be surprised if he doesn't remember you and I said okay I said I just want to say hello because we were passing through and he came out on his two canes and he saw me and his two canes went like that and he threw his arms around me that only and I'm gonna start crying and I said well I didn't know whether you'd remember me or not and he said I would always remember you [Music] over the years I have thought many many times about what was this connection that I had with Norman Rockwell it obviously was a big event in my life from what I can gather at the time it was just part of my everyday it didn't seem to impact me but as I got older and began to reflect I became aware that Norman really affirmed me and really accepted me for who I was where I was and he challenged me he brought me into his whole creation [Music] I seem to be a part of that that was great give to me [Music] before he died Rockwell had thought about the future of his paintings and laid the groundwork to provide a home for them in Stockbridge many of his originals now hang in the Norman Rockwell museum just about a mile from Main Street I'm from small New England town so in a way coming here is in a sense kind of like coming home he means a lot to me an educator and coming from a different country he's so down to earth it means a lot the family like my family he means the average American we used to think of when I was growing up well I thought it was important for him to have his own museum because I thought it was important for America to have its own museum and I really you know think that that is the American Museum that certainly represents the ideals the high ideals you know of this nation and a lot of that museum reflects the history of our nation through Rockwell's eyes if we lose what rock well and rock walls aren't stood for then we have lost something very basic to what it means to be an American I want to raise the flag and all that but I think that's true so when all those black suited black dress chic people mock rock well then you take them aside and you walk them through it's interesting they get it they they dropped the Armani shield and they look and they rediscover that this is part of our culture well now that modernism has just about croaked we're perhaps able to take a more relaxed view of the history of art and and if we do Rockwell will be right in there on the cutting edge of what American art is all about it seems to me [Music] he just sort of got trapped I think as a Hallmark card somewhere along the line [Music] for the time being Rockwell's of course has his own shrine and sanctuaries the Museum in Stockbridge but my hunch is that in 20 or 30 years he will have left his sanctuary and left his low stratum of popular illustration and be absorbed into the history of 20th century art [Music] we find a way to keep the things we love and when things go out of fashion we find a way to keep the things we love Rockwell's went out of fashion he didn't go into the museum but he's still here he doesn't need to be in a museum Norman Rockwell is like the ideal idea of what America should be or in you know what we'd like him to be and somebody's defined art as a lie which helps us to perceive the truth and I think in a way Rockwell fitted that definition he did tell us a lie about America but it helps us to perceive a deep truth about ourselves [Music] [Music] support for American masters is made possible in part by the Park foundation dedicated to education and quality television and by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts additional funding for American masters is provided by Rosalind P Walter Jack Rudin the Blanche and Irving Lorri foundation the Andre and Elizabeth curtains foundation and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you thank you a presentation of wnat New York [Music] you

Channel: Sherway Academy of Music

Views: 359,819

Rating: 4.8915505 out of 5

Keywords: music education, piano, guitar, violin, voice, bass, organ, TV, visual arts, transportation, history, Norman Rockwell

Id: MZQnCiUqQ3Y

Length: 87min 12sec (5232 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017