American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (67 page)

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The Brooklyn Museum retrospective should have been the capstone of Rockwell’s professional life. Finally, after a half century as an illustrator, he was being celebrated as an artist whose paintings were fit to appear not only on magazine covers but in a leading American art museum whose holdings went back to the art of ancient Egypt and whose Beaux Arts building, at 200 Eastern Parkway, was of the exalted Greek-temple variety, complete with a colonnade of iconic Ionic columns out front.

But Rockwell wanted nothing to do with the exhibition. It was almost impossible for him to view it as a meaningful event. It had sprung less from an interest in his work than from the stark pursuit of profit. It had been conceived by a Madison Avenue art dealer interested in raising the value of Rockwell’s paintings by having them gain the imprimatur of the Brooklyn Museum, which, in turn, had taken on the show not to provide visitors with an aesthetic experience but to capitalize on the artist’s popularity, draw throngs to its premises, and relieve its crippling money headaches.

Which is hardly a crime. But it is unsettling to realize that the museum exhibition was no more rigorous than the ones organized over the years by
The Saturday Evening Post
, which promoted Rockwell for its own gain. The
Post
belonged to the world of consumerism, of efficient refrigerators and new cars, whereas an art museum is a nonprofit institution that ostensibly extricates itself from the demands of consumerism in order to better arbitrate aesthetic and ethical issues.

Six weeks before the show opened, Cameron wrote to Rockwell to invite him to the opening reception. “It would mean a great deal to all of us if you could be present on this occasion,” the museum director wrote.
24

“Dear Mr. Cameron,” Rockwell replied tersely on February 8. “My schedule is so crowded it is just out of the question … I am very sorry that I cannot accept the invitation.”
25

Buechner, the former director of the museum, was summoned to do a Rockwell intervention. He personally liked Rockwell and was reluctant to prevail on him for a favor, but did his halfhearted best. “The fact that your schedule is too full to permit your attending the opening at Brooklyn means, to them at the least, that you don’t consider the exhibition very important,” he reminded Rockwell in a letter. “As they have chosen you as the artist to follow last year’s extraordinarily successful exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings lent by the Dutch government, you can imagine their feelings. Please reconsider.”
26
Rockwell did reconsider. His decision was to fly to Europe the day the show opened. He and Molly took a week-long vacation, visiting his son Peter in Rome and continuing on to Tunis and Spain.

Another source of friction was Rockwell’s refusal to lend his best pictures to the show. He declined to share the
Four Freedoms.
At the last minute, at Buechner’s urging, he did relent on
Marriage License
and
Shuffleton’s Barbershop
, both of which were on loan to the Old Corner House. One condition: the paintings could be shown only in Brooklyn and would have to skip the yearlong tour that would be taking the Rockwell retrospective to some ten museums. Just two weeks before the show opened, Rockwell called a taxi and had the two paintings driven down to Brooklyn. “I’ll be glad to send down for them when the exhibition is over,” he pointedly informed Cameron.
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Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective
opened at the Brooklyn Museum on March 22, 1972, and stayed up for two months. It was accompanied by a glossy catalog of the same title, which acknowledged up front that the show had been organized not by the museum, but by Danenberg. Abrams stood to profit from the show as well. In addition to publishing the exhibition catalog, he conveniently became a Rockwell collector moments before the show opened, acquiring a cache of Rockwell paintings whose value was likely to rise as a direct result of the exhibition.
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(No painting ever went down in value by being put on view at an art museum.) Six paintings in the exhibition catalog were identified as belonging to the “Collection Harry N. Abrams,” among them
The Flirts
,
Weighing In
, and
A Time for Greatness
, which depicts JFK in a room jammed with delegates, receiving the acclamation of his party at the Democratic National Convention. Abrams presumably acquired the paintings with the intention of selling them and, over time, the Rockwells he lent to the show would find their way into the first-rate art collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Although Rockwell missed the opening reception, the PR department at the museum was eager to have him pay a visit. A staff publicist drew up a memo entitled, in earnest, “Luring Norman Rockwell to the Brooklyn Museum.”
29
The memo noted, “If we can get him down here for one day, we can arrange a Channel 5 interview … perhaps a Gabe Pressman interview.”

Rockwell never did see the sixty-year retrospective. Perhaps he and Molly felt uneasy about the commercial thrust of the show, which was less an homage to his artistry than his potential salability. Or perhaps his absence was more of a reflection of a general exhaustion with the madding crowd. On some days he felt as if his memory was going and it did not take much to make him feel overmatched.

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The most important review of the retrospective appeared long after the show closed at the Brooklyn Museum. Peter Schjeldahl, a poet-turned-art-critic in his early thirties who lived on St. Marks Place in the East Village and was known as a champion of new art, reviewed the show in his Sunday column in
The New York Times
on June 24, 1973, beneath the amusing headline
STILL ON THE SIDE OF THE BOY SCOUTS—BUT WHY NOT?
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By then the retrospective had traveled to nine museums and become “an abbreviated remnant” of its original self. Schjeldahl saw it at its final stop, the Danenberg gallery on Madison Avenue. His review was groundbreaking, a litany of firsts—the first nonhostile review of Rockwell’s work by a hip young art critic, the first to find an exhibition catalog as “irresistible as a can of salted peanuts,” the first to acknowledge the commonalities between Rockwell and the seventies art scene, one of them being that Rockwell’s method of rendering from projected photographs was similar to that of the Photo-Realists, whom Schjeldahl described as “the most radical wing of current American painting.”

Nimbly dismissing a line of (unnamed) critics going back at least to Clement Greenberg and snobs who believed that art should be limited to the happy few, Schjeldahl calmly concluded that “the gap between Rockwell and modernism is just a gap, not a battle line.”

His comment implicitly acknowledged the respect that Rockwell commanded among a new generation of artists. Photo-Realists, Pop artists, and at least one stray Abstract Expressionist had seen his debut gallery show in 1968 and come away impressed. Schjeldahl was personally acquainted with de Kooning and later recalled visiting him, circa 1972, at the artist’s studio-barn in East Hampton. Noticing a hefty new monograph lying on a table, he asked with more than a bit of surprise: “Rockwell?”

De Kooning replied in his accented English, “Yes, Rockwell,” and proceeded to open the book and show him something. He handed Schjeldahl a magnifying glass and made him look at the almost infinitesimal but energetic brushwork in the corner of one reproduction. “See?” de Kooning said, “
Abstract Expressionism!”
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THIRTY-THREE

“BUT I WANT TO GO TO MY STUDIO”

(1972 TO 1978)

In 1972 Rockwell was well aware that he was losing his memory. He often felt confused and discombobulated. It has been widely reported that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, but the only reliable test for determining Alzheimer’s is a biopsy of brain tissue; no autopsy was performed when Rockwell died. It does not diminish his disease to refer to it as plain, lowercase dementia.
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However it is characterized, it descended like a dense fog and he drifted in and out of it.

Magazine editors, aware of his condition, no longer called much. Nor did the art directors at advertising agencies who had pursued him for years. But there were a few people who wanted to have their portraits painted. In the past, Rockwell had declined such requests; there was not enough time for them. But Molly now welcomed the interruptions, so long as the sitters could afford his fee, which started at around $5,000. While some of Rockwell’s friends criticized Molly for committing him to unchallenging work, she did, to her credit, bring in assignments that enabled him to keep working for most of the last six years of his life. It was not a glorious conclusion to his career, but it helped stave off despair.

And so they came, American icons who wanted to have their portrait done by an American icon. In August 1972 Rockwell was contacted by the golfer Arnold Palmer, who had been hoping for a full-length likeness. “I can only do a head and shoulders,” Rockwell replied.
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Two weeks later, Arnold and Winnie Palmer traveled to Stockbridge by private jet and brought along an entourage of Winnie’s awestruck female friends, housewives from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Palmer’s operation was based. The portrait session lasted for a few hours, during which time Rockwell told Palmer to turn his head this way and that as Louie Lamone took photographs that would be used as reference material.

In one of the photographs from that day, Rockwell and Palmer are standing outside his studio, straddling bicycles. Palmer is wearing a spiffy golfer’s cardigan. He is in his prime, his early forties, a well-built man with massive shoulders. Rockwell is waif-thin and has wavy white hair. He stares dully at the camera. No more humor in the eyes.

An inexplicable chunk of time—two years—elapsed before Rockwell finished the painting. It is a decidedly imperfect object that shows Palmer dressed in a white button-down shirt, with a disproportionately large seventies-style collar rising up like an iceberg from the oceanic surface of his chest. His carmine-red cardigan is unbuttoned at the top. The background, which appears unfinished, consists of three horizontal bands of green. It consists, in other words, of enough green to cover a golf course. Palmer loved it and hung it outside his office.

Dementia, it is generally believed, damages the portions of the brain required for forming and storing new memories and planning complex tasks. By 1973 Rockwell still had enough motor control to hold a pencil and draw with relative fluidity. But his work depended on a high degree of organization and he no longer had the patience or concentration to undertake the series of descriptive refinements his work required of him. When he lost that, he pretty much lost everything, because no form had ever moved him until he captured it with as much verisimilitude as a pencil would allow.

Dementia, of course, does not necessarily prevent an artist from working. Willem de Kooning is the famous example of an artist whose dementia was accompanied by a remarkable period of fecundity. When he was in his eighties, he produced a group of paintings that were hailed as genuinely inventive. They spawned intense questions about the link between a faltering brain and creativity. Some doctors speculated that the deficit in semantic memory that characterizes Alzheimer’s was offset by backup memory systems, such as working, procedural, or episodic memory.

In Rockwell’s case, there was no final eruption of creativity, only a slow and frustrating decline. Perhaps abstract painters afflicted with dementia have a better chance of continuing their work than realist painters do. An abstract painter can mold space intuitively and go wherever his hand takes him, whereas a realist painter is obliged to track already-existent structures, to make trees that look like trees and not like sailboats.

On September 18, 1972, just two weeks after Palmer’s visit, Rockwell was visited by Frank Sinatra. A photograph that appeared in
The Berkshire Eagle
shows the artist in the doorway of his studio, pipe dangling, holding open the screen door as he shakes Sinatra’s hand.
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Rockwell appears tired, but Sinatra is grinning and visibly pumped. He has just flown in from Palm Springs to sit for a portrait. He was fifty-six years old, a generation younger than Rockwell. “When I found out Rockwell was going to paint me, I felt like I was dipped in gin,” Sinatra later noted in a letter, using a Vegasoid metaphor to express his delight.
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Since Rockwell was too weak at this point to leave his home for out-of-town portrait sessions, celebrities from all over the country made their way to western Massachusetts to sit for him. If they stayed overnight, Jane Fitzpatrick, who owned the Red Lion Inn, provided accommodations. She later recalled seeing John Wayne on the premises. “What a wonderful guest,” she said. “I saw him walking down the front steps on a Sunday morning, buckling on a gun. He was nice to all the kids, whereas Frank Sinatra was just awful. He came into town in a long black limousine, spent twenty minutes over at Norman Rockwell’s posing for pictures, and left.”
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Colonel Harland D. Sanders, by her estimation, was an exemplary guest. “He stayed at the Red Lion Inn and gave out Kentucky Fried Chicken gift certificates to the kids he ran into.”
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Rockwell had never been nostalgic for his own childhood and the process of aging did not change him in that regard. He had only one sibling and he did not go down to Florida for his brother’s last illness or funeral. In 1955 Jarvis had written that astounding letter to his brother, the one in which he lamented not knowing where Norman lived or where his sons went to college. When Jarvis died, on May 9, 1973, the brothers had not spoken for a long time. Rockwell jotted on his calendar: “Jarvis died in Florida, Dick”—who was Jarvis’s son—“called and told me.”