American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (33 page)

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,
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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,”
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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.
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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.
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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.

*   *   *

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.
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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.”
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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.

*   *   *

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.
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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.

*   *   *

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?”
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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.

*   *   *

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.