For both paintings, he used students and professors as his models, giving them a chance to see how elaborately staged his photography sessions were, as well as to observe his considerable prowess as a director. Throughout the months at the Art Institute, he also cordially invited interested parties to his studio to watch his methodical, if sometimes agonized, approach to painting. Although he varied the steps depending on the project, Rockwell typically projected onto a canvas the photographs he wanted to use, and then roughed them in by tracing them with a pencil or charcoal. At this stage, the tracings looked more like squiggles than drawings, and if he was sure ahead of time what part of a photograph he would employ (the tilt of a man’s head, the shape of an apple), he felt comfortable having his assistant—in California, a Hollywood photographer named Pete Todd—trace the image, since he mostly used it just to arrange his composition. Although advances were made in projectors over the next few decades, Rockwell stuck by his Bausch and Lomb model, the Balopticon that he had used from the early stages of his career, when he used to pro-ject his sketches instead of photographs. He touted it to his students as an evil necessity, essential for enabling the illustrator to meet deadlines, but deadly if the artist stopped practicing his free drawing out of laziness enabled by the machine.
After he’d used as many of the photographs as he felt efficient, Rockwell would next make a detailed, finely tuned charcoal sketch. Then, he would project that sketch onto the linen canvas, usually thirty-three by forty-four inches, larger than the Post cover reproduction. He approached the covers as if they were art for himself, not a commercial patron, and treated them as if painting stories for people to look at directly, not something for commercial reproduction. Any concessions he made to mass reproduction dealt with clarity of storyline; because, according to marketers, the audience needed to grasp the meaning within two seconds, he exaggerated facial expressions to convey the emotion immediately. Such belief in the integrity of his painting stood behind his unusual practice of framing his painting before delivering it to Philadelphia.
Also uncommon was Rockwell’s practice of painting a complete color oil “sketch” before starting the final picture, so that he could work out the color scheme to his satisfaction. These sketches were often highly finished, and some critics preferred them to his finished covers, because the painting was usually looser. It had only been in the previous few years that the illustrator realized that his various sketches and charcoal renderings were valuable to collectors, as well as the final oils. When he found out that people in the Los Angeles art community owned some of his early work from the twenties, he traded the sketches of his current projects for the older pieces, since the studio fire of 1943 had left him bereft of his work prior to that year.
Throughout the spring, Rockwell lectured at special classes, judged local beauty contests, and entertained journalists such as Hedda Hopper, who coyly reported in her gossip column that Samuel Goldwyn had roped the artist into doing a portrait of one of the mogul’s favorite actresses. In his autobiography, Rockwell went further, claiming that the producer hired him to paint the ads for a movie until the illustrator decried the inauthentic costumes, offending Goldwyn. Jarvis Rockwell’s memory of the Hollywood connection is twofold: the family’s fear of what his mother might awkwardly announce when Hedda Hopper was around, and the standing invitation, infrequently accepted, for the kids to use Walt Disney’s swimming pool whenever they wished. According to Diane Disney Miller, Disney’s daughter, Clyde Forsythe was a good friend of her father’s, and it seems likely that Disney and Rockwell first met through Clyde’s introduction on one of the earlier California vacations.
Rockwell was also busy during this period helping Al Dorne establish what he excitedly believed would be an innovative way to reach America’s talented heartland. Dorne’s earlier suggestion that Rockwell think how he might participate in such a project was serious: a prominent group of American illustrators, Rockwell among them, discussed the best way to organize the proposed correspondence school in New York, to be called the Institute of Commercial Art. Al Dorne thought the school could work in conjunction with the prestigious, nonprofit Society of Illustrators, of which he was currently the president. The Society had to back out of the arrangement, partly because of New York education laws and conflicts regarding nonprofit organizations, and Dorne relocated the project to Westport, Connecticut, where rents were cheaper and where many of the teachers already lived. According to an interview Rockwell gave in the late 1960s, in its early stages, the school negotiated an exchange with Yale University, although those connected with Yale’s art department as well as with the Famous Artists’ School remain flummoxed at Rockwell’s revelation.
Rockwell’s initial enthusiasm for the project, however, seems well founded. According to Walt Reed—the author of important texts on the history of illustration, and the owner of New York’s Illustration House, a prominent gallery of the nation’s premier illustrations from the last 150 years—the course was the best ever devised for the study of illustration. Founded on the principle of postgraduate education for talented illustrators, the school asked twelve top artists to devise a course of study based on their own methods of producing their work. The proposed format would allow the enrolled students to receive instructions and critiques of their work, through the mail, from the painter with whom they had signed up. The teachers also would gather a couple of times a year at the school to compare general notes and to offer a few special classes.
During its first months of operation in 1949, students were allowed to pick the teacher they wanted to study with, but after 90 percent of them chose Rockwell, the consortium of instructors revamped the curriculum, so that every student would receive one lesson from each of the twelve teachers. Even this concept was predicated on more advanced students than those who actually enrolled, however, and, finally, the course of study devolved into a covey of well-respected but less famous instructors hired to teach from a four-volume compilation based on the original twelve instructors’ lessons and to critique the students’ work themselves. The original twelve faculty members offered workshops twice a year for these teachers and, during those times, they demonstrated how they would choose to respond to various students’ submissions.
Al Dorne was the perfect person to spearhead such an institution. Championing the profession of illustration, he was frequently outspoken: “I understand there is a fine line drawn here between what are considered two kinds of art—fine art and commercial art. In fact, there are two kinds of art: good art and bad art. That is the only difference.” Dorne’s school was on the cutting edge of education, providing big-city advantages to small-town customers, a democratizing of higher education that appealed greatly to Rockwell. His own scrupulous account of his working methods shows how seriously he continued to take the role of teacher, and the lessons became the basis for his book Rockwell on Rockwell, which, along with Arthur Guptill’s text, remains the most thorough explanation of his techniques in existence.
While her husband was growing stronger on the West Coast, from both a change of atmosphere and the excitement of burning new tracks, Mary Rockwell was merely surviving. Newspaper interviews with her, in which she rather listlessly claims that the job of a famous painter’s wife is to encourage him to maintain his integrity, are accompanied by photographs that show a woman with sad, tired eyes. “I’ve wanted always to feel that [my husband] was confiding his purposes in his art to me,” she said, “and that I would never stand in his way of accomplishing it for any selfish reasons of my own.” A little later, she adds, “A creative artist never stands still. He goes either backward or forward. And it’s somehow the wife’s job to help her husband grow.”
It is hard to see how Mary Rockwell could have felt very important during this period. Rockwell got more attention than ever, between the camaraderie and interest of new colleagues, and the numbers of awed students following him around the campus of the Los Angeles Art Institute growing weekly. When t
he projected course to be team-taught by Mugnaini and Rockwell was announced for the summer, it filled immediately.
The illustrator’s newfound celebrity included an increase in the numbers of visitors invited to his studio to respond to his current work-in-progress. Mary was used to the communal criticism that Rockwell compulsively solicited. Although his closest friends joked that he ended up doing what he thought best anyway, his recruitment of advice was, in fact, as genuine and interested as the flattered spectators believed. “He’d invite people into his studio to critique, and watch their faces to see if they instantly got the picture or not,” Mary Schafer recalls. “We all felt we were contributing to an important thing. He’d take in all the opinions—and the next day he’d discard them all.” Only Mary Rockwell’s opinion carried true critical weight. Although this dynamic remained in place in Hollywood, she was nonetheless encountering increased numbers of outsiders who clearly believed their judgments significant to Rockwell’s work just when she was feeling more fragile emotionally than she had ever been.
As the family prepared to return to Vermont at the end of the summer in 1949, Jerry announced that his interest in pursuing a professional career had crystallized; he felt sure it was the right thing to do. Rockwell immediately devised a plan that he thought might help everyone, including Mary, who would be comforted by having her sons nearby: they would insist that Tommy, who was very happy at Oakwood, return to Arlington High School, and Rockwell would build a studio for Jerry adjacent to his. Jerry could attend the Art Students League in Manhattan for a few months, then come home to his own professional setup next to his father’s.
In fact, the beautiful studio was almost an exact (smaller) replica of Rockwell’s own. And while his eldest son was pleased, he was also somewhat intimidated to be working under the literal shadow of his overly disciplined father. Nonetheless, he did go to the New York school where Rockwell had begun his career, and during those months, he even spent some time studying at the National Academy of Design as well.
Back home, it turned out to be especially fortunate that Tommy, in many ways the easiest child, with his good looks, high grades, and easy affability, had stayed home with Peter to help keep his mother company. Rockwell became engrossed in yet another career crisis, this time emanating from the Post’s art director. For years, as the illustrators had seen their independence eroding, they had been tense about the increasing power invested in such positions. So far, Rockwell had held his ambivalence in check and had experienced no reason to doubt his autonomy. But the previous year, Ken Stuart had pushed the artist too hard, both in requesting that he paint Stuart’s ideas rather than his own, and in suggesting minor changes in the finished products. This fall, Stuart overplayed his hand.
He wrote to Rockwell to inform him that they’d made a few changes in his recently submitted oil, Before the Date, because Post audiences weren’t as sophisticated as professionally trained artists and would be confused by the formal perspective Rockwell had employed. The staff had agreed that the two young people preening for their date, a girl and a young cowboy, would appear to be dressing in the same bedroom. Reluctantly, Rockwell accepted the critique and the art director’s adjustments. But when the picture was published, the artist saw that Stuart had actually painted out the figure of a horse Rockwell had placed within the window view of the cowboy. His shock reverberates in the letter he shot back to the Post.
Distraught, he told both Ken Stuart and Ben Hibbs that things had gone too far. For an artist to find his work altered without his permission, to have someone else “paint it” and use his name, was unethical, even stretching as far as he could. If this was now the policy of the Post, Rockwell could work for them no longer.
He was serious, that much is clear. And over the next six months, Hibbs treated him delicately, wooing him back to happiness. Ken Stuart had provoked a showdown that he lost. Once Rockwell realized that he took priority over Stuart with Hibbs, he began extending himself to befriend the conquered art editor. As he later told Mary, he had won, and from now on, they should all just be friendly. The best work would get done that way.
Clearly, however, both personal and professional pressures were affecting Rockwell’s work. During the late fall, he began his sketches for The Facts of Life, a relatively straightforward painting of a middle-aged father sitting down to explain the birds and the bees to his adolescent son, the painting deliberately suggesting that the two parties are equally terrified. He would spend a year and a half on the minor painting, completing one oil rendering only to decide the room was wrong. After finishing the next version, set in the living room instead of the bedroom, he realized he’d used the wrong father figure. On and on the changes went, making the painting his most fraught, at least for his youngest son, Peter, who posed for the child in one of the cover’s incarnations. Now convinced that his father’s own discomfort with sexual frankness and his concern about adequately fathering his own sons were the grist of the supposedly artistic difficulties, Peter remembers the bizarre determination to get it right in this painting that plagued his father for eighteen months.
In light of the typical father-son connections of the period, and given Rockwell’s own coming-of-age as he watched his uncle die of syphilis from “being with too many women,” the tension seems understandable. But Rockwell’s obsessiveness over this particular subject literally cost him greatly, because he spent so much time on the one picture that he had to take out loans to cover his lack of income.
And in the meantime, Rockwell’s family scene was breaking down around him. By 1950, Mary was beginning to reach out to friends in the community to regain her mental stability. Clara Edgerton, her next-door neighbor, was, by now, taking commissions to New York and even transporting Post covers to Philadelphia when Mary was feeling bad. Soon, the kindly woman started accompanying Mary daily on long walks, allowing her to sound off about her depression. At night, when Mary couldn’t get to sleep, she began calling Toby Schaeffer to talk, keeping Mead’s wife up till two or three A.M. with her long discussions of what she could do to reinvent herself and to flesh out her own talents. “My mother had always been a partner with my father,” Leah Schaeffer recalls. “She was his photographer, and they had this teamship that I didn’t feel Mary and Norman did. Maybe that’s because my father didn’t work nearly the hours Norman did either, or take his work so seriously. Sometimes Schaef would say, for God’s sake, Norman, the painting is finished. Just stop! And Norman would say he just had to do one more thing to it. He said he wanted to please his audience, and my dad said why? And when he said he wanted to be a household name, my father and Jack Atherton would yell at him, and they’d all really get into it. So Mary had to live with that kind of ambition and perfectionism, and she liked talking to my mother about it.”
Mary had found no release in the world outside herself; instead, her Arlington friends such as Joy Edgerton remember her searching for “something” in nearby Episcopal and Catholic churches. She joined a writers’ group, and though the stories and poems she proudly shared with her sister show signs of literary intelligence, their clumsiness and cliché in no way bode well for her aspirations to send them eventually to The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly. Her life kept unraveling, instead of improving: during this next year, according to her sons, she had two car accidents, apparently related to her drinking. She would later have her driver’s license revoked by the Massachusetts police; since she still lived in Vermont, her driving to Riggs must have been the occasion of their action.
During the first few months of 1950, among some of the most trying personal times Rockwell had faced since the humiliation dealt him by his first schoolteacher wife, he painted what many consider his masterpiece, Shuffleton’s Barbershop, appearing as the Post cover on April 29, 1950. His art historian son explains that his father loved finding new challenges, and now he had taken on the problem of painting a small group of men playing musical instruments in an illuminated inner cubicle at the back of a
large darkened room, all seen through a plate-glass window. Finally, he had created a powerful painting, whose impact lies in the details that overwhelm in exactly the right way, in their potency. The final moment in which Rockwell compulsively adds the overkill to most of his paintings, pushing the portrait into caricature partly to avoid being judged as a serious artist, never occurred in this painting. It’s as if Mary actually spirited the piece away from him, as she threatened to do so many times when he was overworking a painting.
John Updike once observed that Shuffleton’s Barbershop “yields nothing in skill and reflective interplay to a Richard Estes. It differs from an Estes in the coziness of the details Rockwell has chosen to illuminate . . . [but] this is amazing painting.” The painterly achievement in such prosaic moments as the stepboard on the barber’s chair, its metal grillwork articulated but in shadow, capture the viewer’s attention as much as the scene-within-a-scene. And the small black cat that sits quietly near the front of the outer room, observing the elderly men in the distance as they practice their instruments after closing time, controls the viewer’s experience perfectly, refusing any tendency for the onlooker to feel superior as the outsider who sees without being seen. The cat, lacking the careful articulation of the rest of the painting, also contrasts in its plebeian status to the potentially arty treatment through the left side of the plate glass, where the background is rendered en grisaille, a method of working up a scene in shades of gray and tan often used to imply distance.
Norman Rockwell Page 43
