Indeed, one of the minor marvels of the ’60s was that the period made Rockwell happier than he’d ever been. But it was only the first of his 1960s paintings to upend everything “Norman Rockwell” stood for. Amid the familiar Rockwelliana on display there is 1964’s The Problem We All Live With - which his biographer Deborah Solomon, in her 2013 book, American Mirror, calls “the most famous painting of the civil-rights movement”- as jarring as it must have been in the pages of Look magazine more than 50 years ago. The tumultuous ’60s would convert Rockwell into an overt social liberal - and the era’s unlikeliest practitioner of polemical art.Įven the Norman Rockwell Museum can’t make sense of his late-life political transformation. That would have been most people’s guess, at least. In any case, he was obviously too sedate to change his spots, no matter how speedily the country around him was changing. Murrow on CBS’s Person to Person in 1959, responded that he couldn’t think of any, except the “countless hours” he spent tearing up diaper cloths for use as paint rags. Not the most well-rounded of men, Rockwell, when asked to describe his leisure activities by Edward R. At ease only when at his easel, he took little interest in hobbies - or even in his family. It’s unlikely he even considered retiring. Norman Rockwell and Mary Barstow, just before their marriage in 1930. The demotion of Rockwell’s Main Street America to the Rat Pack’s Nowheresville wasn’t explicit, but everybody got the gist. A few months after JFK’s inaugural, the magazine would promise jittery advertisers a drastically modernized look under a new editor-in-chief who promptly recanted the Post’s endorsement of Nixon the previous fall. Worse, the Saturday Evening Post wasn’t the national arbiter it had been. The concept of kitsch had begun following Rockwell around in print like one of the lovelorn puppies he would include in a painting whenever he was at a loss for an effect (a habit that he would later mock). From Andy Hardy movies to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Hollywood’s version of homey American verities was by and large a facsimile of Rockwell’s.īut by the time he cast that vote in 1960, his perspective was growing increasingly remote from the bulk of his fellow citizens’ lived experience in cities and postwar suburbs. In the four and a half decades since his Post debut in 1916, his humorous vignettes of awkward situations and glowing ones of social and domestic rituals had defined the nation’s most idyllic self-image. Most midcentury Americans would have had trouble fathoming the idea that Norman Rockwell had ever been that young or unknown. Untempted by the bohemia of Greenwich Village and seemingly indifferent to (or unnerved by) the concept of a love life, he had business cards printed for himself while he was still in his teens. Before his 16th birthday, he had dropped out of high school to enroll at New York’s Art Students League. īorn in 1894 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Rockwell had never shown interest in any other career besides commercial illustration. Produced in partnership with Epic Magazine. But nobody could disagree that he’d had a good run. By choosing Kennedy instead, Rockwell might as well have been casting a ballot to hasten his own obsolescence. Nixon still espoused a mealy-mouthed fealty to those pseudo-Rockwellian virtues. In those newly cosmopolitan times - the Mad Men era, for shorthand’s sake - the Anytown, USA, that Rockwell had depicted on hundreds of Post covers was becoming a curio at best and an object of derision at worst. His second wife, Mary, who struggled with alcoholism and depression, had been a chronic patient there. He’d called Stockbridge home since relocating from rural Vermont six years earlier, mainly for proximity to its renowned Austen Riggs psychiatric center. It was only a short walk down Main Street from the two-story Colonial house supposedly once occupied by Aaron Burr, whose derelict red barn Rockwell had converted into his fastidiously tidy studio. He’d painted portraits of both candidates for the Saturday Evening Post, and he just didn’t like Richard Nixon’s face. Never the most forthcoming of men, Norman Rockwell hadn’t told his family he was backing John F. Sometime on Tuesday, November 8, 1960, a 66-year-old widower and self-described “moderate Republican” went to his polling place in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to vote for his state’s junior senator for president.
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