Rockwell often told the story of how he conceived his Four Freedoms in the middle of the night, how they came to him almost unbidden as he was lying in bed in Arlington, at three in the morning. He had recently attended a town meeting at which an acquaintance, Jim Edgerton, stood up to criticize a decision to rebuild a school that had burned down.4 Nobody agreed with him, but everyone listened. “That’s it,” Rockwell thought to himself. “That is Freedom of Speech.” He was in his studio at five that morning, roughing out sketches and spinning them into large drawings in which ordinary people (his neighbors) are shown doing ordinary things that affirm basic American freedoms and implicitly knock totalitarianism.
In mid-June Rockwell bundled up four oversize charcoal studies and set off with Mead Schaeffer on the long train ride back to the capital. Schaeffer, too, hoped to design war posters and had prepared some drawings of soldiers in action. They stayed at the Mayflower Hotel, near the White House, and were joined there by Orion Winford, an emissary from Brown & Bigelow, the company in St. Paul that published the annual Boy Scouts calendar. He had the odd, occasionally hellish job of having to coax a new painting out of Rockwell once a year and had come to Washington in the interest of oiling their relationship.
In the morning Rockwell and his entourage met with Patterson, the undersecretary who had admired his poster for the Ordnance Department. The poster of the machine gunner. But posters were no longer foremost in his thoughts and when he looked at the four charcoal drawings, he was distracted. So Rockwell visited another office. “The sketches were on big paper, which we would roll out like an Armenian displaying a rug, and then stand there grinning with expectation,” Rockwell later told an interviewer.5
At the time, President Roosevelt had just created the Office of War Information, a centralized propaganda agency that replaced assorted federal bureaus whose functions had overlapped. The OWI would exploit every available medium, from leaflets and pamphlets to radio programs and feature films, to foster support for the war.
One of the agency’s self-declared missions was “to assist American artists who wish to take part in the war effort.” But when Rockwell visited the office, he received a painful snub. An official declined to look at the charcoal studies he had brought with him. “The last war you illustrators did the posters,” the official said without apology. “This war we’re going to use fine arts men, real artists.”6
Rockwell, who always avoided confrontation, let the comment slide. In public, he declined to disclose the man’s identity. In all likelihood, it was Archibald MacLeish, the poet and editor and versatile intellectual. He had previously served as an editor at Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine,7 a rival of the Post, and contributed to the mission statement for Life. Known among his friends as Archie, he was, by temperament “a cold fish, rather pompous and, for all his poems celebrating the democratic virtues, a snob,”8 as the novelist Thomas Mallon notes.
With the founding of the OWI, on June 13, 1942, MacLeish became assistant director of the agency. He was able to commission work from any artist he admired. Perhaps to be provocative, he invited Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the Japanese-born American artist, to design a poster for the OWI just six months after Pearl Harbor. He was also interested in Stuart Davis, Reginald Marsh, and Marc Chagall, the last of whom was not American.9
By the end of the summer, MacLeish had hired one of his Fortune colleagues, art editor Francis Brennan, to oversee the OWI’s Bureau of Graphics. What did Brennan hope to achieve in that capacity? “Certainly now, in this greatest of all wars, is the time to find out if another Goya is fumbling in Iowa, or another Daumier sketches acidly in Vermont,” he told The New York Times on August 9, upon starting the job.10
The comment grates. Why would the government pretend to be looking for “another Goya”? Goya, who painted bullfights and witches, whose message was one of cumulative anguish, is not the first artist you would necessarily choose to compose posters exhorting Americans to buy a war bond or plant a victory garden, to do with less, give it your best and consider becoming a nurse. It made no sense. It was simply a case of a government official strutting his cultivation, and it is distressing to think that the petty biases of cultural snobbery existed even at the Office of War Information.
Put another way, patriotic art carried a stigma in the very agency charged with commissioning patriotic art during World War II. MacLeish and Brennan, failing to recognize the graphic virtues of many of the posters for World War I, believed they could entice avant-garde artists to subordinate their gifts to the demands of patriotic posters. But the designs eventually submitted to the OWI by various modern artists—including Kuniyoshi and Salvador Dalí—were never made into posters and MacLeish would leave his job after eight months, vaguely citing policy differences.
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Rockwell, in the meantime, unable to interest the OWI in his Four Freedoms, started back to Vermont with Schaeffer. They got off the train in Philadelphia, for a meeting with Ben Hibbs. Their timing was excellent. Hibbs, who had accepted his job only three months earlier, was trying desperately to repair the damage inflicted by his predecessor, to restore the Post to good editorial standing after the debacle of the crass article about American Jews. When he looked at Rockwell’s four charcoal drawings, he believed he saw the solution to his problems.
Here, he saw, was a tribute to President Roosevelt and his administration. Here was a chance for the Post to mend relations with the White House and erase the animus created by George Horace Lorimer and his rants against the New Deal. Hibbs instructed Rockwell to hurry up and finish the paintings in two months, at the latest. Rockwell promised he would. Hibbs was sufficiently new and unknowing in his job to actually believe him.
Rockwell once told a reporter he conceived his Four Freedoms series on July 16, 1942, a date that has stuck. But he had a habit of mangling dates and June 16—a month earlier—is no doubt what he meant. On June 26, James Yates, the art editor of the Post, wrote to inform him that the magazine was already working on the layout for the four (not-yet-painted) paintings and was thinking of asking President Roosevelt to write an accompanying essay.11
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After returning from Philadelphia, Rockwell put everything unnecessary aside. He resolved to refuse all advertising work, to turn down the admen who were always hovering, offering him serious money to do paintings to help sell Schick razors or Bosco chocolate drinks or Green Giant canned vegetables. He used every dodge he could think of. He claimed to be traveling. He claimed to be gravely ill. Leo Burnett, who owned the leading agency in Chicago, wrote to Rockwell, “Naturally, we’re greatly disappointed to get the news contained in your letter of July 9 regarding your inability to do the Niblets corn picture for us. We hope that your visit to the hospital is as pleasant as such an experience can be and that you have a good-looking nurse.”12 There was, of course, no trip to the hospital, no nurses of either the attractive or homely variety.
He had told his editors that the project would take eight weeks, a calculation based on a wishful equation of one painting every two weeks. Instead the project consumed seven months, during which time he was reduced to a state of nervous exhaustion.
Many people see the Four Freedoms as the crowning achievement of Rockwell’s career. Others feel that, as works of art, they pale beside his magazine covers and represent an exercise in patriotic boosterism devoid of his trademark humor. Yet you need not talk about them as a foursome. They are four interrelated but self-sufficient paintings. I would say that one is a complicated masterpiece, one is marred by excessive earnestness, one is as famous as the Statue of Liberty, and one is a conventional interior. They are discussed here in the order in which they were created.
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Freedom of Speech came first and did not come easily. It turned out to be a harrowing ordeal that took Rockwell two months to complete. He did four versions before he decided that he was done. They all portrayed the same subject: a swarthily handsome, working-class man standing up to speak
at a crowded town meeting. Different versions of the painting show the speaker from different angles. In the end, Rockwell went with a composition that imbues the speaker with a looming tallness and requires his neighbors to literally look up at him.
The speaker is dressed casually, in the clothes of a laborer. He wears a blue-and-black plaid flannel shirt, unzipped a few inches to expose his neck, and over that a suede jacket. His hands are dirty and his complexion is the darkest in the room. You wonder if he is supposed to be an immigrant. The men around him are dressed in white shirts, ties, and jackets and presumably have wives and children—in the lower right, a man’s pale, plump fingers and wedding ring receive undue visual emphasis.
Freedom of Speech, 1942 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
But the speaker isn’t wearing a ring. He is unattached and sexually available, unbuttoned and unzipped. So what we have here is a scene of town fathers listening respectfully to a swarthy, sunbaked, blue-collar neighbor, an outsider from the working class and maybe a person of ethnicity (Italian? Greek?) who isn’t afraid to think for himself or to stand alone and who represents both the promise of the town and a threat to its genteel homogeneity.
The model for the speaker was Carl Hess, who in fact was married at the time. He owned a one-pump gas station in Arlington and his father, a German immigrant from Hannover, is also pictured in the painting. Hess had “a noble head,” according to Gene Pelham, a young artist from New Rochelle who worked for Rockwell during this period, taking reference photographs and helping out in the studio. It was Pelham who had initially spotted Hess and brought him to Rockwell and who owned the suede jacket that figures so prominently in the painting.
Rockwell had Hess pose, by himself, on eight disparate occasions. “I stood up several times at every sitting,” Hess recalled.13 The many other figures in the painting posed by themselves as well, and some would wind up, in the finished version, visible only as a fragment: a forehead or an eye or a shapely ear glimpsed in a crowd.
Is the painting credible? Not completely. It seems unlikely that established banker types would be trying to glean wisdom from an ordinary worker. Moreover, with his eyes cast skyward, the speaker looks a little frozen, as if he belongs to another painting; he could be standing in a field of corn at night, or preaching to the birds along with St. Francis of Assisi. Freedom of Speech remains an extraordinarily popular painting and can be described without hyperbole as the defining image of American democracy in progress. On the down side, it is compromised by a near absence of women, making it look as much like a meeting of aging male Elks or Rotarians as of the varied citizenry of an American town.
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The next painting, Freedom of Worship, also took a long time to get right. The first version was set in a barbershop and showed a handful of men representing various religions getting haircuts. But Rockwell felt that the intended message—religious tolerance—did not come across. The painting consumed him for all of October and most of November. The final version features eight heads crowded together in a shallow space; they are shown in profile, facing westward. They represent people of different faiths coming together in a moment of prayer. The man in the lower right clasps a Bible and is supposed to be Jewish. The old, abundantly wrinkled woman toward the center is Protestant. The pretty, auburn-haired woman beside her, whose face appears lit, is supposed to be Catholic. When Rockwell asked Rose Hoyt, the model for the Catholic woman, to pose with the string of rosary beads she is holding in the painting, she informed him that she was Episcopalian. He asked her: “Would you be a Catholic for today?”14
Freedom of Worship, 1942 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Freedom of Worship is, in the opinion of this viewer, the weakest of the four paintings. It is too didactic to satisfy. The heads, which overlap in a flat plane with not an inch of space between them, essentially amount to a wall of flesh that leaves no place for your eye or your imagination to wander.
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The third painting in the series, Freedom from Want (see color insert), is one of Rockwell’s most accomplished works. It takes you into the dining room of a comfortable American home on Thanksgiving Day, and you can tell from the light coming through sheer curtains that it is still mid-afternoon. The guests are seated at a long table, and no one is glancing at the massive roasted turkey or the white-haired grandma solemnly carrying it—do they even know she is there?
Mrs. Wheaton, who was employed as the Rockwells’ cook, modeled for the grandmother and also prepared the turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Rockwell arranged to have it photographed. Then the family sat down to eat. He later said it was the first time he consumed one of his models.
Not that the painting bears much relation to Thanksgiving dinner as it actually unfolded in the Rockwell manse. The nine adults and two children who appear in the painting were photographed in Rockwell’s studio, nowhere near a turkey leg or stuffing, over the course of several days before Thanksgiving. Afterward, their cheerful faces were painted into the picture. Rockwell’s mother, Nancy, the old lady with chalk-white skin, sits across from Mary Rockwell, whose face is barely visible.
Note the man in the lower right corner, whose wry face is pressed up against the picture plane. He glances out at us with a playful, slightly conspiratorial expression, an implicit wink-wink. He has the air of a larksome uncle who perhaps is visiting from New York and doesn’t entirely buy into the rituals of Thanksgiving. He seems to be saying, “Isn’t this all just a bit much?” In contrast to traditional depictions of Thanksgiving dinner, which show the premeal as a moment of grace—heads lowered, praying hands raised to lips—Rockwell paints a Thanksgiving table at which no one is giving thanks. This, then, is the subject of his painting: not just the sanctity of American traditions, but the casualness with which Americans treat them.
The painting, notes the art critic Robert Hughes, has a “Puritan tone confirmed by the glasses of plain water on the table.”15 But Rockwell eventually came to see Freedom from Want as just the opposite. He believed he had erred on the side of overabundance, making the turkey too big. In the fifties, the painting would be criticized overseas as an example of American consumer gluttony.
With this painting, Rockwell achieved a new level of descriptive realism. Yet the painting doesn’t feel congested or fussy; it is open and airy in the center. Extensive passages of white paint nicely frame the individual faces. The dinner plates, the freshly ironed linen tablecloth, the woman’s apron, the diaphanous curtains—these various white objects make the painting one of the most ambitious plays of white-against-white since Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1.
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Freedom from Fear, the last of the four pictures, is the most anecdotal. It invites you into an upstairs bedroom with a low, slanting roof, and is usually described as a painting about a mother and father putting the kids to bed. Actually, the boy and girl are already asleep—they share a narrow bed, their heads heavy on their pillows, and their parents are looking in on them before they turn in for the night. And, as any parent knows, watching children sleep can elicit a powerful, almost primitive sense of well-being. Here, the mother bends forward and delicately lifts the edge of a bedsheet with both hands, to better cover the children. (It echoes the painting he had done during his first marriage of a mother covering a daughter.) Her husband appears in shirt sleeves and suspenders, standing by her side, a classic Rockwell onlooker, a viewer surrogate, passively observing the scene as you observe him observing. You suspect that he has spent the evening reading the newspaper, in a comfortable chair in the living room, because he’s holding his wire-rimmed glasses and a folded copy of the Bennington Banner, whose partially visible headline (BOMBINGS KI … HORROR HIT) refers to the bombing of London. The scene has some of the feeling of a French interior, with lovely haut-art touches. Note the light visible in the hall outside the bedroom, coming up the stairs from an unknown source on the first floor (a lamp?) and thinning as it goes.
The blanket is a lyrical object, a fuzzy, soft-edge rectangle of white that amounts to its own abstract painting.
Freedom from Fear, 1942 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
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By the end of December, after nearly seven months of continuous labor, the quartet of paintings was finally finished. “He was broke because he spent so much time on the Four Freedoms,” Schaeffer recalled. Rockwell put them on display for a few days at the West Arlington Grange, before having them crated and shipped to Philadelphia. Each one was sizable, about four feet tall and three feet wide, big enough to fill the space above a fireplace.
The Post, in the meantime, was already at work on “one of the greatest promotional campaigns since the coming of Burma-Shave.”16 The publicity for the four paintings began prior to their publication. President Roosevelt was solicited by the magazine to write a letter of praise, and he actually agreed to do it. “I think you have done a superb job in bringing home to the plain, everyday citizen the plain, everyday truths behind the Four Freedoms,” he wrote in a letter to Rockwell dated February 10.17
The White House gave a draft of the letter to Forrest Davis, a Post reporter in the Washington bureau. The president said he was leaving it up to the magazine to revise the letter and produce an “official” version to thank the Post for publishing the Four Freedoms. So the Post wrote a thank-you letter to itself, signed by President Roosevelt.18
It also enlisted the promotional skills of Eleanor Roosevelt, who, on February 21, could be heard in a national radio broadcast, commenting in her strong, careful voice about freedom of speech. In advertisements for the event, the Post left it unclear whether she would be speaking about her husband’s text-only “Freedom of Speech,” or Rockwell’s painted interpretation of it, perhaps hoping they would blur into one.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 23
