American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

by Deborah Solomon

  Rockwell, accompanied by Molly, arrived in Moscow on December 20, 1963, on a flight from London. They stayed for a month, at the Budapest Hotel, an old, slightly tattered place not far from Red Square and the Kremlin. Every morning at eight, instead of the punctual walk to his studio in Stockbridge, Rockwell walked briskly through subzero weather to the building at the Soviet fairgrounds where Graphic Arts USA was installed. Then he worked all day, much as he always did. A wire story filed from Moscow on Christmas Day describes him sitting in the middle of the exhibition, sketching a portrait of a Russian girl. “He plans in the next three weeks to sketch about four Russians a day—some in black and white, some in color,” the article reported.

  Secluded on a little balcony, he was basically on exhibit himself. See the American artist, with his relentless work ethic! With the help of translators, Rockwell picked Russians out of the crowd to pose for him. He sketched old men in their furry ushanka hats, old women with kerchiefs tied under their chin. He painted most everyone in partial profile, looking away from him, perhaps for his own comfort. Onlookers oohed and aahed as faces materialized on his pad. “In about five minutes he had it down,”11 recalled Jack Masey, the head of the exhibitions program for the USIA, remembering how dazzled he was by Rockwell’s ability to capture a likeness in so little time.

  During his month in Moscow, Rockwell came to feel that the myth of Communism bore little relation to the reality. He was upset by the presence of Russian officials who watched to see whom he picked to model, wanting him to paint only the most physically attractive Russians. “They didn’t like the fact that Norman chose the poorer types of people instead of the prettiest ones,” Molly later explained.12 “They created such a fuss about the peasants and older people Norman selected that he just gave up and let them determine who his models were to be. He was quite unhappy about the whole thing.”

  One day Rockwell pulled Masey aside and tensely mentioned that he wanted to paint a portrait of Nikita Khrushchev. He said it could run in Look. He had already met Mrs. Khrushchev, a plump, round-faced woman who, on a tour of the graphic arts show, had stopped by Rockwell’s workshop and said hello in heavily accented English.13 He found her charming and told her he would like to paint her portrait before he left town.

  Masey thought the idea was nuts, but Rockwell was persistent and Masey agreed to see what could be done. He called a colleague at the American Embassy, who in turn requested a meeting with the Soviet minister of culture. Sometime that January, a meeting was held. There were five or six men, including translators. Seated at a long conference table, on the side reserved for Americans, Rockwell pushed samples of his work across the table to where several Soviets were arrayed and said, “I would like to do a portrait of your president.”

  “I knew there was no way in the world they would ever say yes,” Masey later recalled. “Khrushchev had never posed for a non-Communist.”

  After some more negotiations, Masey had to break the news to Rockwell: the Russians had said nyet. No explanation had been offered. “I’ve never seen such a disappointed person,” Masey said.14

  * * *

  During his stay in Moscow, Rockwell exhibited his own work in Graphic Arts USA, and the reaction was mixed. He had brought the original Four Freedoms with him, rolled up in a metal tube, and displayed them at the fair. Freedom from Want, the scene set at the Thanksgiving table, evoked sharp criticism in Pravda and Izvestia, the official gazettes respectively of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. The painting, it was said, showed affluent Americans gorging themselves on mountains of food while the rest of the world went hungry.

  Other pictures were seen as too humorous to appeal to sober Russian sensibilities. “For Russians, Rockwell is a new product,” reported an unsigned AP article.15 “He makes gentle fun of American life. He does not fit into the pattern of Soviet realistic art.”

  That opinion, by the way, contrasts sharply with that of Rockwell detractors who persist in likening his work to Soviet socialist realism, a style of art which offers rosy portrayals of life under Communism—women in kerchiefs standing and smiling amid bushels of wheat, muscular men with their shirtsleeves rolled up, building factories and waving red flags. Interestingly, Russians did not think that Rockwell’s work was allied with their own tradition of socialist realism. They saw skepticism, jokiness. They saw a style of realism in which the most real thing was the humor that undercut the realism.

  Rockwell’s Boy Scouts paintings were the exception. They lack irony. They are straightforward and propagandistic. They were created for calendars. On December 6, at the opening reception for the Graphic Arts USA exhibition, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, the deputy minister of culture, ridiculed an abstract print by Boris Margo, comparing its flattened disk shapes to “blinis.” But he paused to admire a Rockwell calendar illustration showing “a wholesome Scout leader surrounded by his happy charges.”16

  * * *

  The Rockwells left Moscow on January 20, 1964, and on the way home made a little seven-thousand-mile detour to Africa. For some time, Rockwell had been thinking about visiting a Peace Corps operation in rural Ethiopia, for a possible feature in Look magazine. He had first heard about that corner of the world from his bookkeeper, Chris Shafer, whose son John was a Peace Corps volunteer. Flying into Addis Ababa, the country’s capital, Rockwell and Molly were met by Harris Wofford, who led Peace Corps efforts in the region, and drove them to a hospital to receive yellow fever shots. From Addis Ababa they headed out to the bush, traveling in an old airplane with no roof. They stayed overnight with the young volunteers, in facilities with outside toilets and no running water, and later their hosts commented on how funny they were, how gracious, how alert to small things.

  They arrived home in Stockbridge on February 1, 1964, two days before his seventieth birthday. Rockwell was pleased with the sketches of the Russian people he had done on his trip. He exhibited them at the Stockbridge library that spring and allowed them to be reproduced in the magazine American Artist. It was how he defined himself now, a man who looked at the people of the world and offered them his empathetic gaze. A man who could talk at length about “Contemporary Art and Social and Political Conditions in Russia and Ethiopia,” to borrow the title of a lecture he gave to a high school history class in Stockbridge that March.

  To be sure, his open embrace of civil rights irritated more than a few Americans, and when Rockwell returned home from Russia, he found sacks of disapproving mail that Look had forwarded to him. Countless subscribers to the magazine, especially those whose letters were mailed from the South, had not cared for his Ruby Bridges painting. Look published a letter from one Joe E. Moore, Jr., of Bedford, Texas, who doubted that Rockwell was sincere in supporting racial integration: “Just where does Norman Rockwell live? Just where does your editor live? Probably both of these men live in all-white, highly expensive, highly exclusive neighborhoods. Oh what hypocrites all of you are!”17

  Over time, The Problem We All Live With would come to be widely appreciated as a defining image of the civil rights struggle in this country. What makes it so powerful is that its central figure is both a symbol and a real person, a little girl slicing through all the injustice in the world. She would reappear in many guises in American culture, even in musical comedy. “That painting he did about the little black girl walking—that’s in Hairspray,” recalled John Waters, the director and writer of the film. “That inspired L’il Inez in Hairspray.”18 L’il Inez is the charismatic African-American girl in Baltimore who helps break down racial barriers by being the best dancer in town.

  For a long time, the public had no idea of Ruby Bridges’s name. Instead people thought of her as that “little Negro girl,” as The New York Times described her in 1960,19 withholding her name from articles out of concern for her safety. It was not until 1978 that Ruby Bridges was first mentioned by name in the Times,20 in an article about the child psychiatrist Dr. Robert Coles, and by then she was a woman of twenty-two who had skipped
college and was working as a travel agent trainee in New Orleans.

  When did she become aware of the existence of Rockwell’s painting of her? “I was about 17,” she recalled years later. “Someone showed me a picture of it. I think it’s a great piece of work. He was sort of taking a risk, I think, by making such a stand when he did.”21 She and Rockwell never met.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON, ART CRITIC

  (1964 TO 1967)

  On July 2, 1964, six months after Rockwell’s painting of a heroic black girl walking into a white school appeared in Look, the Civil Rights Act became law. Finally, there could be no more separate lunch counters or hotels or theaters, no more discrimination in public places such as schools and libraries, no more inhumane banishment to the bumpy back row of the bus. This is not to say that the new legislation was universally acclaimed. The South was predominantly Democratic, but Democrats there bore little relation to the ones up north. They were so uncomfortable with the Civil Rights Act that they were threatening to vote President Lyndon Johnson out of office in November.

  That summer Rockwell was assigned by his editor at Look to paint portraits of the president and his opponent for an Election Day issue. He flew out to San Francisco in mid-July, when the Republican National Convention was underway at the Cow Palace. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and hero of conservative Republicans, sat for his portrait at campaign headquarters in his trademark horn-rimmed glasses. He had opposed the new civil rights law, claiming it violated the sanctity of states’ rights, a phrase that many considered a lame cover for institutionalized racism. “I didn’t vote for him,” Rockwell later said of Senator Goldwater, “but he was a very cooperative model.”1

  That same week, on July 16, at 11:30 a.m.,2 Rockwell was ushered into a portrait session with President Johnson at the White House. It was their first meeting. It was held precisely two Thursdays after the president had signed the Civil Rights Act into law and Rockwell found him impatient and crotchety. The president appeared dismayed when Rockwell asked for an hour of his time, saying the most he could spare was twenty minutes and instructing Rockwell to “get cracking.”3 So Rockwell proceeded much as he always had, sketching away, making amusing comments, instructing his subject to look this way or that while a photographer took pictures from every angle. “I decided to do the best I could, but he was just sitting there glowering at me,” Rockwell recalled.4

  With only a few minutes left, Rockwell tried to reason with his subject. “Mr. President,” he said, “I have just done Barry Goldwater’s portrait and he gave me a wonderful grin. I wish you would do the same.” So the president indulged him, or at least tried. For the last minute, he forced his mouth into a manifestly fake smile, “like he was competing for the Miss America title,”5 as Rockwell later recalled.

  The portraits appeared in Look, on inside pages, on October 20, 1964, two Tuesdays before Election Day. FULL COLOR, the magazine boasted with uppercase excitement on its cover, as if color photography, which was still fairly new in popular magazines, somehow mirrored the revolution in sexual mores and offered a lusty antidote to the camouflage of the gray-flannel fifties. The portrait of Johnson, with his long face and droopy hound dog ears, cannot be said to have rehabilitated the tired tradition of the presidential portrait. But it is probably as appealing as a portrait of Johnson can be: psychologically astute, devoid of pomp. He is shown from the neck up, a middle-aged Texan with deep creases around his mouth, a hint of shadow beneath his cleft chin, his thinning hair combed straight back. Instead of gazing assuredly at the viewer, as American politicians are almost professionally obligated to do, he looks off to the side, a bit sadly. This is LBJ not as the champion of the Great Society, but as a man who feels anxiously aware of the gap that separates his proposals for reform from the enormity of the problems facing the country.

  Ever since painting his first portraits of presidential candidates (Dwight Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson) for The Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell had always presented the paintings and accompanying sketches as gifts to the candidates, by which time they were no longer candidates but winners or losers. President Johnson thanked him for the portrait, however perfunctorily, in a letter composed on September 15, 1965: “I am glad to have the original of the painting that you did of me last year.”

  None of this would suggest that President Johnson loved Rockwell’s portrait of him or enjoyed the ordeal of posing for it. But he did in fact love it, as he realized in an art epiphany six weeks after receiving the gift, when an established painter named Peter Hurd unveiled for him yet another portrait—the so-called official presidential portrait. Hurd, a native of New Mexico known for his hilly, adobe-colored scenes of the Southwest, was part of the exalted Wyeth clan. He had studied with patriarch N. C. Wyeth, the great book illustrator based in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, then married his daughter, Henriette, the sister of Andrew Wyeth and herself a painter.

  Much like Rockwell, Hurd felt exasperated by the time allotted, or rather not allotted, for his portrait of President Johnson: he was given only two sittings. One took place at Camp David, the retreat in Maryland, where the president was posing in a chair when his head slumped onto his chest and he appeared to nod off for a few minutes, depriving Hurd of any view except for the pomaded strands of gray hair combed across the top of the presidential scalp.

  At the end of October,6 Hurd and his wife transported the painting to the LBJ ranch in Texas hill country for a private unveiling. Truth be told, it is not a great painting—a three-quarter-length affair, in which the president looks mannequin-stiff as he stands outdoors in a dark suit, gazing off as if trying to read cue cards located just beyond the left edge of the painting. He is holding a book whose generic title (History), visible on the cover, remains unaccompanied by any hint of the book’s author, perhaps because this is a book that no one ever wrote. Behind him, in the distance, the white dome of the U.S. Capitol glows against an early evening sky streaked with purple. President Johnson did not hesitate to share his opinion of the painting with the artist. He took one look and pronounced it “the ugliest thing I ever saw.”7 When Hurd asked, “Just what do you like, Mr. President?” Johnson rushed to his desk and pulled out from a drawer an old Look magazine, shouting, “I will show you what I like!” Then he waved the portrait that Rockwell had done.

  Hurd countered derisively, “I wish I could copy a photograph like that.” The president insisted the portrait was not a copy of a photograph, that he had in fact posed for it. He added that Rockwell had managed to produce it after only one, inordinately efficient twenty-minute audience with him, which is perhaps what the president liked best about the portrait.

  Lady Bird, in the meantime, took it upon herself to provide Hurd with what she believed were well-founded criticisms of the painting. She recalled in her diaries “a gruesomely uncomfortable half hour”8 in which she proposed several major changes. For one thing, the painting stood four feet high—too big in Lady Bird’s estimation. She found the sunset garish and was particularly bothered by the portrayal of the president’s hands, which she felt were not the “gnarled, hardworking”9 presidential hands she knew and loved but a bland simulacrum. Hurd, she noted, “was the first to admit that the body, and especially the hands, were not good, because he had not had enough sittings.”10 Her verdict was that Hurd should go back to his studio and make a smaller portrait in order to omit the president’s hands altogether. Then the Johnsons would look at it again.

  After seeing Peter Hurd’s portrait of him, LBJ denounced it and decided retroactively that he liked Rockwell’s earlier portrait of him.

  For all his stated affection for Rockwell’s portrait of him, President Johnson was willing to part with it for political gain. He used it as a chit to please a supporter. Unknown to Rockwell, Johnson regifted the painting in 1966 to a friend in Texas. “Norman Rockwell sent me a portrait I thought you might like to have,”11 he wrote that April to Robert Kleberg, Jr., who owned the King Ranc
h and had just embarked on a dubious plan to establish a wildlife refuge stocked with deer and nilgai antelopes on the site of the president’s own birthplace. “I am sending it to you, suitably inscribed, for your home.”

  Peter Hurd, in the meantime, eventually lost interest in undertaking a second portrait of the president. He decided instead to put the original one on public view, seeking the small satisfactions of revenge. The story broke on January 5, 1967, in a women’s page feature in The Washington Post,12 and was quickly picked up by newspapers and magazines all over the country. Speaking to reporters by telephone from his ranch in New Mexico, Hurd cheerfully denounced the president’s behavior (“very damn rude”13). It turned out that a majority of Americans sympathized with Hurd and agreed that the president had treated him shabbily. The story of the callously rejected portrait seemed to confirm LBJ’s reputation as a man who was insulated from the public and had no patience for opinions other than this own, not least when the opinions came from his various advisers who thought the country should get out of Vietnam.

  Hurd was happy to expound on his art and his technique for his new following. He explained in interviews that he favored the quaintly ancient technique of egg tempera. Consequently, his portrait of President Johnson had taken him a total of “400 hours,” the implication being that the quality of a painting, not unlike homework, is directly related to the amount of labor expended on it.