American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (65 page)

Faced with an immobile deadline, Rockwell improvised. He painted a head-and-shoulders portrait jiggered together from various visual sources. He basically grafted Nixon’s head—which came from photographs taken by
Look
a year earlier, during the campaign—onto the shoulders and hands of a man who posed for Rockwell in Stockbridge. What was intended as a portrait of Nixon seated on a couch instead looks like a painting of Nixon’s head visited by an unrelated hand.

Nonetheless, it is relatively flattering, as far as portraits of Nixon go. The thirty-seventh president had a “pear face,”
25
as the writer Garry Wills observes, a face that appeared heavier about the mouth and jowls and seemed to recede from you about the brow and eyes. His sloping nose was the stuff of easy caricature. In Rockwell’s portrait, Nixon assumes a partial Rodin-
Thinker
pose, meaning hand raised to chin, a clever maneuver on Rockwell’s part that allowed him to conceal Nixon’s jowls behind his left hand and give him a more angular and attractive jaw.

He delivered the painting to
Look
on November 25, the Monday before Thanksgiving, and gave thanks that it was finally finished. It was eventually acquired by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., which was desperate to find a noninflammatory likeness of the president to hang in a room previously reserved for Peter Hurd’s portrait of LBJ. When Larry Casper at the Danenberg gallery initially called Rockwell to inform him that the National Portrait Gallery was interested in buying what it called a “done-in-life portrait” of Nixon, the artist was surprised. Nixon, after all, had declined to pose for the portrait and his shoulder and hands belonged to a total stranger. But the curators at the National Portrait Gallery apparently thought the painting was at least in the “done-in-life” ballpark.

“See how much you can get for it,” Rockwell instructed Casper, departing from his customary practice of allowing presidents to keep his portraits of them at no charge. He was pleased when the National Portrait Gallery offered him $6,500, with help from Nixon’s private foundation. “He was happy to let it go,” Casper recalled.
26

*   *   *

With Nixon out of his studio, Rockwell returned to the album cover for Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. He had already sent a charcoal sketch of the two musicians to Columbia Records, seeking approval before continuing. There was always a chance that a client might bail after seeing the sketch. Kooper loved it, even as he acknowledged that his physique could stand some improvement. “At the time I was very thin, like a Bangladesh poster boy,” Kooper recalled. He asked Rockwell if he could paint him “10 pounds heavier.”
27
In the end, the album cover of
The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper
shows the two musicians in cinematic close-up, their bushy-haired heads framed against a sky-blue ground that is unusually loose and brushy for a Rockwell. Bloomfield is on the left, a thin man with pouty lips and a dreamy-stony gaze. He tilts his head toward Kooper, his chin resting lightly on his friend’s shoulder. Kooper appears more assured, larger—Rockwell has indeed added the requested ten pounds. He lifts up his chin as if to glance out from greater heights, or perhaps to better display his black turtleneck and three strands of love beads.

In 1968 Rockwell provided the portrait for the album jacket of
The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper
.
(Courtesy of Al Kooper)

The cover can put you in mind of another album that had just been released by Columbia records: Simon & Garfunkel’s
Bookends
, which had come out in April, and whose arresting cover, with its black-and-white portrait by Richard Avedon, resists the psychedelic imagery of its era in favor of the moodily poetic. Rockwell’s album cover shares much with that of
Bookends
: the same close-up view of two male faces, the same aura of silence.

*   *   *

On December 31, 1968, Rockwell and Molly flew to Nassau for a vacation. She could see how much he needed a rest. His show at Danenberg had barely closed when Danenberg started pushing him to schedule a second show for the following October. Moreover, Danenberg was imploring him to put aside his commercial work and try painting for himself, try to be an official American Master instead of just an overworked illustrator.

Rockwell said he would try, and maybe he meant it at the time. In the past, his sporadic efforts to make “real art”—to undertake a painting that had not been assigned to him by a magazine or an advertising agency—hadn’t worked out. His last effort had been made a decade earlier, in 1958, when he had publicly announced that he was taking a sabbatical from the
Post
and going off to be a real painter. There were, to be sure, the portraits he had done in Peggy Best’s sketch class; he had shown them at the Berkshire Museum in 1958. The show had garnered no reviews, except for a piece in
Newsweek
that carried a painful headline—
NORMAN ROCKWELL ASTRAY
—and assessed his nonillustration paintings as roughly comparable to “the work of a competent amateur.”
28

He felt inadequate enough being an illustrator trying to get his assignments in on time without shouldering the added burden of art. That was the deal with commercial illustration: if you were lucky, you were permanently overbooked with assignments, and deadlines arrived faster than your ability to dispense with them, likes flies too numerous to swat. Rockwell felt as if he was working from “exhaustion to exhaustion,” as he told a local reporter.

Danenberg was thinking about ways to enlarge Rockwell’s reputation as a fine artist, which is what dealers are professionally obliged to do. But Rockwell had no illusions about his longevity. Picasso, Pollock, even Warhol—those guys would still be known in a hundred years, carrying the contorted face of the twentieth century into the future. He could hardly expect the same for himself. Popularity was a losing game in the long run. He had only to think back to his dear friend J. C. Leyendecker, a household name after World War I, to know that even the most dazzling careers in magazine illustration eventually fade to black.

THIRTY-TWO

THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM

(1969 TO 1972)

On February 3, 1969, Rockwell celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. His big plan for the day, he told a reporter, was to get a haircut. He was scheduled to fly down to Cape Kennedy in Orlando the next day, accompanied by Molly, to do some preliminary research on a painting of the moon landing for
Look.
The haircut got top priority, he joked, because “I don’t want to disgrace Stockbridge down in Florida.” He added that he was very grateful that he still had a few strands of hair to cut.

As Rockwell continued to accept assignments and produce new work, he paid little attention to the older drawings and paintings collecting dust in his studio. Like most artists, his creative relationship with a painting ended when it acquired a frame. Molly Rockwell, on the other hand, had begun to contemplate the possibility of keeping his paintings together in Stockbridge, on display at the Old Corner House, which was about to open to the public.

The project had begun in June 1967, after a developer threatened to despoil the old Dwight House, a handsome white clapboard right on Main Street, at the corner of Elm. His plan was to erect a supermarket on the lot. There is nothing like the mention of a new A&P to spawn alarm among preservationists, and the members of the Stockbridge Historical Society quickly raised $40,000 to buy the house. At first the Old Corner House didn’t have much to do with Rockwell. It was conceived as a home for the historical society, which was then squatting in the basement of the town library. Its collection included papers and assorted
objets
going back to 1734, when the first white man, the Rev. John Sargeant, settled in Stockbridge and persuaded Indians to join his congregation.
1

On May 31, 1969, two summers after it was purchased, the Old Corner House opened quietly to the public. By then Rockwell had agreed to place some thirty-five paintings on “permanent loan,” including his
Four Freedoms
,
Marriage License
,
Stockbridge—Main Street
, and
Shuffleton’s Barbershop.
Molly Rockwell was on the board of directors (second vice president), along with Mrs. Clement Ogden (president) and Mrs. James Deely (first vice president). Rockwell himself kept an unambiguous distance from the project, declining to serve as an officer. He claimed to find the attention embarrassing and over time visited the historic house as infrequently as possible.

Rockwell appreciated the Old Corner House even less as the number of visitors doubled and then tripled. Thousands upon thousands of people who had Rockwell images lodged in their brains like dimly remembered family photographs would be thrilled to rediscover them and see how large the original paintings were, much larger than a magazine cover. Some of the visitors saw fit, during their trip to Stockbridge, to stroll by Rockwell’s studio in hope of getting a peek at him, requiring him to close his curtains during the day. Some even knocked and tried to say hello, their faces lit up with reverent wonder as he stood in the doorway trying to appear calm. “In the later years, it got to be crazy,” recalled Lamone. “We had to put a sign up outside: ‘Please go to the Old Corner House.’”
2

*   *   *

As Molly Rockwell and the matrons who oversaw the Old Corner House held regular meetings and were pleased to learn of a steady increase in the number of visitors—admission was a dollar and went toward the upkeep on the house—Bernie Danenberg sat in his gallery on Madison Avenue, pursuing an opposite vision. He wanted to sell as many Rockwell paintings as he could, to disperse them among collectors. In addition to mounting a show at his gallery, he believed he could burnish Rockwell’s salability by arranging for certain tributes and events, the kind that most people assume originate on the basis of pure merit and without interference from the Bernie Danenbergs of this world.

First, he called his friend Harry N. Abrams, the venerable art-book publisher, and proposed Rockwell as the subject of a monograph. The idea was clever, because Abrams was known for its sumptuous monographs on artists ranging from Michelangelo to van Gogh to Jasper Johns and was able to confer the luster of art history on living artists. A suave, stylish man in his sixties, Abrams was London-born and Brooklyn-reared. He had grown up working in his father’s shoe store, an aesthete pondering two-toned oxfords.

In October 1968, on a Sunday afternoon when Rockwell’s show was still up at the gallery, he was called in for a meeting with Abrams. It was on this occasion that Danenberg proposed that he and Abrams jointly publish a Rockwell monograph. The key word was
jointly
. Abrams recoiled at the notion, and said bluntly, “Bernie, you don’t know anything about the book-publishing business.”
3
Abrams, in fact, wanted to do the book on his own. He offered Danenberg a 3 percent commission on sales, suspecting it would satisfy the art dealer’s need for involvement. “I lived for about five years on that commission,” Danenberg later said.
4

As the two men conferred on the details of the Rockwell monograph, Rockwell stood off to the side of the room as if the project had nothing to do with him. He did not even request royalties. Everyone agreed that his role in the book would be minimal. Of course he had made the art, but never mind. “Why should he get anything?” Danenberg asked years later with apparent sincerity. “The book was my idea and I got Tom Buechner, my friend, to do the text.”

Indeed, Buechner, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, was commandeered to produce an authoritative essay. He was perfect for the task, an accomplished art historian and figurative painter whose views were appealingly iconoclastic. Rejecting the familiar narrative that reduces modern art to the birth and unfurling of abstraction, he believed realist painting had been criminally neglected at least since the Armory Show of 1913 and that Rockwell deserved much better treatment.

It might seem odd that a museum director would write such a book promoting an artist who was not part of the museum’s collection. Solution: add a Rockwell to the collection before anyone notices the absence. In January 1969
Tattoo Artist
was delivered by truck from the Danenberg gallery to the unloading dock of the museum.
5
Trustees voted to add it to the permanent collection one week later. That was the painting, from 1944, that is set in a seamy tattoo parlor, where a sailor is having “Betty” inscribed on his left arm by a male tattooist who is seen crouching from behind on a crate. The sailor’s arm is covered with a list of crossed-out names belonging to former girlfriends: Sadie, Rosietta, Ming Fu, Mimi, Olga, and Sing Lo, a testament to his numerous romances.