Hardly. Girl at Mirror remains riveting as an image of ambivalent womanhood, with its sensitively rendered female figure. Actually, seen from the back, she could be a boy; her left shoulder bulges a bit, and her adjacent trapezius muscle (to the left of her spine) is also beefy. But glimpsed from the front—in her mirrored reflection—she is slim and unmistakably girlish. In other words, there are two girls in the painting. There’s the real girl, perhaps a tomboy, who has sneaked upstairs to the attic with her Movie Spotlight fanzine (do her parents even allow her to read it?), propped a mirror against a chair, and put on her mother’s lipstick. Then there’s the other girl, the reflected mirror image that she confronts across a dark divide.
Who is that girl in the mirror? Covering her breasts with both arms as she raises her hands to her chin, she appears vulnerable and even fragile. Her toy doll, dressed in layers of ruffles and tossed on the floor, is a bizarrely sexualized object. A series of oil sketches indicate that Rockwell originally situated the doll behind the mirror, sitting up primly, and it was only in the final painting that he moved the doll to her position of smashed innocence. She is shown bent over, legs splayed, her rump lifted into the air and pressed against the hard edge of the mirror. With her right hand buried in her petticoats, the doll could almost be masturbating. She adds to the sense that Girl at Mirror is a painting about a girl who seems both excited and shamed by the call of adolescent sexuality.
Girl at Mirror, 1954 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
You wonder if Rockwell was influenced by Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, from 1932, which he would have seen on his many trips to the Museum of Modern Art. For all the glaring differences between Picasso’s and Rockwell’s mirror-gazing girls—one is an icon of Cubist fragmentation, the other of American realism—the paintings have a similarly Freudian feeling. Tellingly, Picasso’s sexy demoiselle appears in a bright room with vibrant wallpaper, while Rockwell’s girl is sequestered in an attic, a reminder of the secrecy and tension that once surrounded sexual awakenings in American life.14
Where exactly in America is this painting set? Rockwell never specifies, although you can be sure that his mirror-gazing girl is not in Levittown, New York, or any other postwar suburb. In 1950, when middle-class Americans were leaving their urban apartments for mass-produced tract houses with picture windows and backyard patios, David Riesman published his sociology classic, The Lonely Crowd, initiating a decade-long critique of suburban conformity and alienation. Although Rockwell’s work has often been viewed as an affirmation of suburban-style normalcy, this is a misconception. Much as he declined to chronicle the massive shift from the proverbial sticks to the city in the twenties, he never acknowledged the shift out of the city and into the suburbs in the fifties. His pictures continued to be set in a small-town arcadia of his own imagining, a place he was searching for not only in his work but in his life as well.
* * *
In the summer of 1954 the yellow house overlooking the cemetery filled up with visitors. Finally, it seemed, there was a family in sight. The Rockwell boys came home for what would be their first summer in Stockbridge. Although Mary had often felt overwhelmed by the infinite obligations of running a household, she decided to dispense with live-in help that summer in the interest of familial closeness and solidarity. In a letter to her sister, she put her customary gloss on her day-to-day life and sounded almost rhapsodic on the subject of her appliances: “I am hearing the heavenly sound of my new dishwasher in operation. This is a pleasure practically unparalleled in my experience!”15
Rockwell and Mary were amused when their two younger sons went into business that summer in the Berkshires. Tom and Peter opened a secondhand bookshop in a narrow building in Lenox, behind the Lenox Hotel. It was written up in the local paper, which noted: “An old antique shop started the boys in business by selling them 500 books for $4.”16 Their inventory expanded to include thousands more books arranged neatly in every available nook and cranny, and among the finds were first editions of works by Henry James and John Dos Passos as well as Arthur Guptil’s book on Norman Rockwell, which the artist happily agreed to autograph.
It was a classic New England summer, made all the more convivial by the appearance of a girlfriend. Tom returned home with Gail Sudler, a willowy art student at Bard whom he would marry a year later. Her father, Arthur Sudler, owned an advertising agency in New York (Sudler & Hennessy) and also dabbled in painting. Gail was welcomed warmly into the family by Mary, who seemed to enjoy having a female ally in the overwhelmingly male precincts of her household. She reported chirpily, in a letter to her sister: “Gail and I are really good friends—she made a great success of her first job, in the Buck’s gift shop.”17
She also made encouraging comments about the state of her marriage: “We are doing nicely, toots, I should say all crises were things of the past. Stockbridge is certainly a much better place for us than Arlington, more life and movement.”
In reality, Rockwell was not well at all. He was despondent over a bitter disagreement with his wife. It was set off when Gail’s parents, the Sudlers, invited him to Europe that September as their guest. Arthur Sudler was planning to stay abroad for a while, in connection with the expansion of his advertising agency. Rockwell had not been to Europe since the early thirties, and Mary liked the idea, too. She could see herself, in tantalizing glimpses, visiting the Cassel Hospital in Richmond, England, a pioneering force in the history of psychotherapy. It was at Cassel that Dr. Thomas Main had devised the concept of “therapeutic community.” Mary told Rockwell that she intended to visit the hospital as “an emissary” from the Riggs community.
But Rockwell believed she ought not undertake the trip, lest she resume drinking and prove unmanageable. Besides, he thought, she had trouble harmonizing with anyone besides psychiatrists. By now he had been in therapy for a year and Erikson was sympathetic to his feelings. Agitating on behalf of his patient, Erikson wrote a pointed letter to Dr. Knight, Mary’s psychiatrist, to ask for his assistance in persuading Mary to stay home.18
His letter begins: “Norman Rockwell is now rather depressed, to the point of suicidal ideas. Behind this is, of course, the general feeling that Mary will never be well enough to live with in reasonable peace, and never sick enough to be sent away.” Erikson explained that his immediate concern was preventing Mary from joining the trip to Europe. As Erikson states, “He desperately needs such a vacation without Mary.” (Italics his.)
Erikson’s letter is a startling document. He asks Dr. Knight to place Rockwell’s interests before those of Mary Rockwell. Moreover, he expresses little faith in the Rockwells’ marriage. An artist who emphatically refuses to take a vacation with his wife perhaps should not be married to her. Yet divorce is not touched upon. Rockwell regarded his marriage as his cross to bear.
In a fleeting acknowledgment of Mary’s situation, Erikson conceded that September was not an ideal month for travel—by then, the Rockwell boys would be back at school, leaving Mary alone in the house. “Yet this period will be a trying one for Norman, too, and I am now definitely worried for him,” Erikson wrote.
Mary did what her husband desired. She withdrew from the proposed trip. Writing to her sister on September 8, she noted calmly: “Norman is going off for a month to Europe on the 13th of October, and I am going to stay here and take a long breath. So—why don’t you come down in October…”19
Then, at the eleventh hour, Rockwell bowed out of the European adventure. Instead he took a sudden side trip to the hospital. He was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in Pittsfield with “a painful condition” involving his back and was absent from his studio for a week.
* * *
During this period, Rockwell did one of his most affecting pictures, Breaking Home Ties, the defining image of empty-nest despondency.20 It appeared on the cover of the Post on September 25, 1954, to coincide with the new school year. Set at a railroad crossing in the Southwest, the painting shows an aging rancher
and his son seated on the running board of an old Ford pickup, waiting for the train that will take the boy off to college. A red flag, and an old-fashioned red-globe lantern, rest on a trunk—they are there to get the train conductor to stop. The father, a hunched, weary figure dressed in a worn denim shirt and jeans, is losing his favorite ranch hand. Even the family collie, which rests its chin on the boy’s thigh, looks heartbroken. The son, by contrast, is a bright-eyed, straight-backed presence in a crisp beige-and-white suit, gazing down the railroad tracks with barely suppressed anticipation. The suitcase resting at his feet is already branded with a red STATE U decal. Best detail in the painting: the boy’s tie, a red-and-white polka dot eyesore, a mile wide and at least two years out of date, adding a trace of humor to this poignant scene of imminent separation.
Breaking Home Ties, 1954 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Initially, in his pencil sketches, Rockwell pictured the boy sitting with his mother and his father. But as he combined photographs of the three models in an effort to compose the best painting, he dropped the mother from the picture and left a large void in her place, on the left. All in all, the rancher is probably the most sad-looking man to appear in a Rockwell painting and it seems relevant that he painted the picture at a time in his life when he was feeling “rather depressed, to the point of suicidal ideas,” as Erikson had written. No wife at his side, only a red flag, signaling for help.
TWENTY-ONE
CRACK-UP
(1955)
A new year arrived in Stockbridge, and the Rockwells spent the holiday at home, in the yellow house overlooking the town cemetery. It was an unhappy time for Mary. On January 12, a Wednesday, she staged a confrontation at her therapy session.1 Rockwell accompanied her to her appointment, in the Purinton House, which was just a few doors away. It had been four years since Mary first met Dr. Knight, her dramatically tall (six foot five), always-calm doctor and the medical director of the Austen Riggs Center. A man with a large, compassionate face, his body leaning forward.
Mary was upset because she had learned that Dr. Knight, a husband and father, had fallen in love with his secretary, a much younger woman named Adele Boyd.2 Mary was well-acquainted with Adele, an elegant brunette whose office was across the hall from Dr. Knight’s, and who said hello warmly whenever Mary walked by. “I remember that last appointment day when she—she really had a blowup,” Boyd recalled. “Clearly, she had a great transference problem.”3
Rockwell did not hold the doctor accountable for Mary’s problems. On January 13, the day after the confrontation, he dropped off a letter that read in its entirety, “Dear Dr. Knight—I have complete confidence in you. Last night I slept twelve hours. Sincerely yours, Norman Rockwell.”4
Mary refused to continue her therapy with Dr. Knight, for reasons that made sense to her, but probably not to her husband. Dr. Knight referred her to Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, one of the younger doctors at Riggs and the only female psychotherapist on the staff. A short, curly-haired woman of Russian-Jewish descent, Dr. Brenman-Gibson was an earthy presence, her long sun dresses flowing about her solid frame. She met with her patients in her plant-filled home office on Clark Street. Mary Rockwell was already acquainted with her husband, William Gibson, who ran a drama group for Riggs patients. As he said of acting: “Being someone else is a great cure.”5
Suddenly, it seemed to Rockwell, every member of his family was acting out and leaving him uncomfortably exposed. On January 19, just a week after the Dr. Knight incident, Peter Rockwell, a freshman at Haverford College, ran away from school with a friend. “We didn’t want to take final exams,” Peter later explained.6 Rockwell was mortified when a local reporter called to ask if Peter had officially dropped out of college. Hanging up, he called Ben Hibbs, hoping the Post’s editor could use his influence to squelch the story. “After you telephoned me,” Hibbs wrote the next day, “I made some inquiries and quickly found that the story about Peter had already gone too far to stop. It had gone out on the wires to other papers, and the radio people also had it.”7
Among the millions of Americans who heard the news was Rockwell’s brother, Jarvis, who was still working as a toy designer in Kane, Pennsylvania, and had never fully recovered from the indignity of losing his job on Wall Street during the Depression. Reading about his nephew in the local newspaper, he was taken by surprise. Norman Rockwell, he was grieved to realize, had never informed him that Peter was living in Pennsylvania, a student at Haverford, or even that the family had moved to Stockbridge. For all he knew, they were still in Vermont.
“Publicly I’m supposed to be very close to you,” Jarvis wrote on January 30, 1955, in a bitter letter.
To know when your next Post cover will appear. To know what schools your boys attend. To know where you live. Actually I don’t know any of those things. I suppose you don’t know similar things about me. About the only times we have met in recent years has [sic] been due to some family misfortune … This last newspaper story about Peter made me realize that you and your branch of the family are really more foreign to me than the families of my business friends. I’d like to think that we can correct this drift into nowhere … I’m happy to be “Norman Rockwell’s brother” but I cannot tell others how little it has meant to me. They would not believe me, or they would think we have had a serious family row.8
They were painful accusations, but Rockwell had little time to dwell on them. On February 1, less than two weeks after his runaway escapade, Peter was injured in a fencing match at Haverford. A pointed blade “pierced his right armpit, just above the edge of the padded chest protector,” as the papers reported. Rockwell and Mary drove through the night to Bryn Mawr Hospital and, after four days there, Rockwell noted with relief: “Peter out of danger.”9
He made the comment in his 1955 date book, which was spiral-bound with a faux-leather cover, a freebie from a Maryland insurance company. He became inclined at this point to record his daily activities, briefly and at times pungently. He spent his sixty-first birthday in Bryn Mawr and returned home to Stockbridge on a Monday, while Mary stayed on for another three weeks to oversee Peter’s hospitalization. She visited her son every day and, by chance, befriended an elderly patient named Betty Williams, in room 454, stopping by to chat with her and “bringing her paper and artist colors to work with.”10 It’s a touching image: the sick trying to comfort the sicker.
It was during this turbulent winter that Rockwell produced Art Critic, which ran as a Post cover on April 16. Set in an unnamed art museum, in a gallery of seventeenth-century Dutch portraits, it shows not an art critic, but a young art student in paint-splattered sneakers who is eager to learn from his predecessors. As he leans forward to better study a woman in a Frans Hals painting—she is the “critic” of the painting’s title—she returns his interest with comically exaggerated disapproval. With her raised eyebrows and wide, popping, cartoony eyes, she seems to be saying to the young painter, “How dare you?”
Art Critic can be read in various ways. Many viewers see it as a mildly salacious joke about a young man who incites the scorn of a comely redhead in an Old Master painting by ogling her cleavage. But it seems more likely that Rockwell, who revered Rembrandt and the Dutch masters and drew so much inspiration from them, intended the picture as a form of self-mockery in which he sends up his overly fussy techniques. Rockwell has portrayed the art student as an egghead, a guy so consumed by the careful, close-up observation of particulars (note his magnifying glass and museum guide book) that he is blinded to the pleasures of oil paint, to all that is bold and immediate and sensual. No wonder the three bearded Old Masters in ruffled white collars, peering out of another painting, are laughing at him behind his back.
Art Critic, 1955 (Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)
Bill Scovill, who photographed the models for the painting, claimed that Art Critic gave Rockwell more trouble than any other painting ever.11 At least twenty drawn and painted studies of the
female head preceded the painting. Perhaps it was the risqué subject matter that threw him. His artist-son Jarvis posed for the art student and Mary Rockwell posed for the Dutch flirt. As was also true of Rockwell’s earlier Christmas Homecoming, the picture pairs mother and son in an encounter fraught with sexual innuendo and it would leave Jarvis incensed.
* * *
Everyone in his family, it seemed to him, wanted something from him, something he could not deliver, and he was beset with feelings of unhappy obligation. Readers of the Post, by contrast, could not praise him enough and he felt gratified by the attention. That spring, the Post organized a fresh round of tributes to Rockwell. The March 12 issue included a special insert called “Rockwell’s America,” a color album featuring reprints of nine golden-oldie Post covers. The issue sold out at newsstands virtually overnight. To promote it, the the Post volunteered Rockwell for everything from an appearance on Arthur Godfrey and His Friends—the CBS variety show whose host liked to strum his ukelele and sing jingles promoting his advertisers—to a museum exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Astoundingly, it was the Post’s marketing department that proposed the exhibition at the Corcoran. The museum, in turn, offered up the first available slot on its exhibition calendar, with the caveat that the Post was to foot the bill. In an internal memo on January 10, Corcoran curator James Breckenridge assured the museum’s director, Hermann Williams, Jr., that: “The Post frames and mounts the exhibition ready to install, and would pay all expenses connected with the show, including that of an opening. It is understood that the Gallery would be placed at no expense for the exhibition.”12 These days, the idea of an art museum accepting an exhibition from a magazine whose marketing department chose the works and picked up the tab would be considered a serious ethical lapse. Museums are supposed to exercise their authority and connoisseurship without interference from the business world. But backroom compromises were standard practice in a more casual era of museological administration, and Rockwell’s show at the Corcoran said less about his artistic standing than about the Post’s deftness at PR.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 32
