Making Curriculum Pop

Read this great article in November's Vanity Fair, it is too large to paste here BUT I thought I'd post some of what I thought were the most interesting passages and some of the facinating photos that illuminate how Rockwell used prepare for his paintings - he was like a film director.

All the images and passages that follow are from

Norman Rockwell’s American Dream
By David Kamp November 2009 Vanity Fair

Pictures Rockwell staged for Saying Grace (1951).

Much has been made of this image [Saving Grace] since it first appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, in November 1951. It has been upheld as a brave and righteous affirmation of the need for religious faith in an increasingly godless society. It has been dismissed as a ghastly specimen of sentimental kitsch. Most commonly, though, it has been celebrated as an affecting snapshot of Americans at their best: jumbled together, disparate of background, yet coexisting peacefully.

What Is an American?

Rockwell himself, posing for his painting Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor (1946).
As it happens, that place looks more familiar now than it might have just a few years ago—and it looks more inviting too. In our current climate of remorseful post-affluence—in our collective pondering of the question “What were we thinking?“—Rockwell’s painted vignettes draw us back to the quotidian, dialed-down pleasures of American life before it got so out of whack.

Rockwell and American Culture NOW

The newfound resonance of Rockwell’s art has not been lost on those keen to uphold his legacy. A traveling retrospective of his career, “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell,” has been pulling in crowds at every museum it has visited—most recently, over the springtime, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, in a city especially racked with longing for better days. “American Chronicles” just spent the summer at its home base, the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which this year is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and the exhibition moves on to the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on November 14. Meanwhile, a second traveling retrospective, “Norman Rockwell: American Imagist,” is making the rounds under the auspices of the National Museum of American Illustration (which is in Newport, Rhode Island), and the Smithsonian Institution is planning yet another major Rockwell exhibition, for 2010, this one built around the private collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Then there is Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, a wonderful new book by Ron Schick (photos from which accompany this article) that lifts the curtain on Rockwell’s working methods, revealing how profoundly labor-intensive and thoughtfully imagined they were. From the mid-1930s onward, Rockwell orchestrated elaborate photo shoots of his models in various poses and setups, resulting in images that, though they were meant only to be studies, are compelling in their own right.

Next month, in conjunction with the book’s publication, the Rockwell Museum will unveil Projectnorman, a new section of its Web site (nrm.org) that will allow users to view the more than 18,000 photographs that Schick has sifted through, all newly digitized and catalogued according to their “parent” painting. Select Saying Grace, for example, and you’ll be able to see that Rockwell had considered including a little girl as well as a little boy; that he himself acted out the old woman’s solemn pose for his model’s benefit; that he had brought Horn & Hardart Automat tables and chairs into his studio for the occasion; that one of the two young toughs eyeballing the grace sayers was played by the artist’s eldest son, Jarvis; that Rockwell posed two chubby Maytag-repairman types as an alternate to the two young toughs; and that he ventured far afield from his New England studio for multiple reference photos of a dreary rail yard (in Rensselaer, New York) just to make sure he got the details at the very back of the painting right.

***

In his own behind-the-scenes book from 1949, How I Make a Picture—Rockwell always referred to his works as “pictures,” like a movie director, rather than “illustrations” or “paintings”—he documented an exhaustive creative “system” in which photography was only the midpoint. First came brainstorming and a rough pencil sketch, then the casting of the models and the hiring of costumes and props, then the process of coaxing the right poses out of the models (Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera is rife with priceless shots of the artist pulling faces and hamming it up to demonstrate the effect he wants), then the snapping of the photo, then the composition of a fully detailed charcoal sketch, then a painted color sketch that was the exact size of the picture as it would be reproduced (for instance, the size of a Post cover), and then, and only then, the final painting.

Photo prep and finished illustrations for Breakfast Table Political Argument (1948), Girl at Mirror (1954), and The Runaway (1958).

Yet Rockwell was no more a man of simple vision than he was the house artist of the right wing. While his approach was calculatedly upbeat, it was never shallow or jingoistic, and his work, taken as a whole, is a remarkably thoughtful and multifaceted engagement with the question “What does it mean to be an American?” This was implicitly the case in his Post years, when he was painting soldiers and schoolgirls and old codgers playing musical instruments in the back room of a barbershop, and it became explicit in his later period at Look magazine, when he forsook the genial apoliticism of his earlier career for an embrace of J.F.K.-style New Frontiersmanship, devoting himself to pictures about the civil-rights movement, the Peace Corps, and the United Nations.

In his later years Rockwell began moving away from familiar themes. His 1964 painting The Problem We All Live With evoked the integration of an all-white school in New Orleans. All reprinted by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency

“I Wasn’t a Country Boy”
Rockwell would have been the first to tell you that the pictures he painted were not meant to be taken as a documentary history of American life during his time on earth, and least of all as a record of his life. He was a realist in technique, but not in ethos. “The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be,” he wrote in 1960, in his book My Adventures as an Illustrator. To miss this distinction, to take Rockwell’s paintings absolutely literally as “America the way it was,” is as misbegotten as taking the Bible absolutely literally. (And it’s usually done by the same people.)


Reflecting on the lasting impact of those vacations some 50-odd years after he’d taken them, Rockwell wrote in his memoir:

I sometimes think we paint to fulfill ourselves and our lives, to supply the things we want and don’t have.…
Maybe as I grew up and found that the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys [who] fished from logs and got up circuses in the back yard.…

The summers I spent in the country as a child became part of this idealized view of life. Those summers seemed blissful, sort of a happy dream. But I wasn’t a country boy, I didn’t really live that kind of life. Except (heads up, here comes the point of the whole digression) later on in my paintings.


This is the essence of the whole Norman Rockwell ethos. From a fleeting experience of life at the closest it would ever get to perfect, he extrapolated an entire world. It was an atypical world for an artist to inhabit, since it focused on the positive to the near exclusion of the negative—an inversion of the outlook favored by the art-crit hegemony of his day, which tended to be more kindly disposed toward artists whose work depicted the turbulence and pain of the human condition. But if it was perfectly valid for the brilliant Norwegian miserablist Edvard Munch to profess, “For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety, which I have tried to express in my art”—with no penalty due for failing to look on the bright side of life—then it was no less valid for Rockwell to infuse his art with all the feelings wrought by his “happy dream.”

***

From where we stand today, the appeal of these pictures transcends nostalgia or any wishful thinking that we can teleport “back” into scenes that were exhaustively posed and staged in the first place. It’s the thought behind them that counts: What does it mean to be an American? What virtues are ours to uphold? What are we like in our best moments? For Rockwell, the answers to these questions lay in the idea, as he put it, “that everybody has a responsibility to everybody else.” His pictures were about family, friendships, community, and society. Solo scenes were rare, and individual self-interest was anathema. To the concept of “the town,” he devoted himself as zealously as a groom does to a bride: for better (the workman saying his piece at a town meeting in Freedom of Speech) and for worse (the 15 nosy Yankees through whom a scandalous rumor circulates in 1948’s very funny The Gossips), but never with any doubt in the sacredness of the institution.

***

Disturbing Masterpiece
Peter Rockwell, now a sculptor who lives in Italy, is emphatic in urging Rockwell fans “never to confuse an artist with his art,” especially in his father’s case. But he advises a long look at Triple Self-Portrait, a high-water mark of his father’s Stockbridge period, painted in late 1959 and published on the Post’s cover early the following year. The artist, with his back to us, leans to his left to take a gander at himself in the mirror while partway through painting his face on a large canvas (onto which are tacked small reproductions of self-portraits by Rembrandt, van Gogh, Dürer, and Picasso). While Norman the painter, as seen in the mirror, is grayed and vaguely glum of expression, with his pipe sagging downward from his lips and his eyes blanked out by the reflected glare of sunlight on his glasses, Norman the painted is chipper and lovable, with the pipe jutting upward and a glint in his (unobscured) eyes.

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This past summer I took Pam Goble's genre study and create lesson plans using various genre. The lesson plan I was most excited about was using Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With for a Socratic Seminar when we read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I just think that the image created by Rockwell is as powerful as it gets and I would love to hear what seventh graders have to say about the message so beautifully "pictured." I also include the picture book, A Wreath for Emmett Till, and Bob Dylan's song, "The Death of Emmett Till." Thank you for bringing this article to my attention. I will definitely use the picture now.
VIrginia - so glad you liked it! I think the "pre-painting" gives students a powerful sense of the process of making narrative art. If you end up teaching this do come back and share the story about using Rockwell with students! I had no idea my mom was rocking Rockwell!

Ryan:)
Not only does she Rock Rockwell, she Grasps Graphics, changes reflection into perfection and puts the yeah! into YA! Happiest of Holidays to Gobles all!
I should say that was punny, right? :)
This article was so good, V. It will add to your repertoire! How are you???
I accidently posted this twice - on the older version Liz Skrodzki posted

I love combining the following four "texts": The Problem We All Live With (too bad about the preposition as well as the problem), the film Ruby Bridges (Disney) and the picture book plus the song "Ruby's Shoes." Ideally it leads up to MLK holiday in January. Many middle school kids claim to have seen the movie early on but it is worth numerous repetitions. Seventh graders begged to see the movie during lunch .(could not "allow" the time in class) The Ruby Bridges web site was not up to date last year but her connection to New Orleans and her mission is inspirational. We (art, language and fine arts teachers) did our action-research for MAT on Best Practices in Empathy Education with this as a centerpiece. I believe the Holt/Prentice texts (maybe 7th grade?) have a Norman Rockwell lesson. This Rockwell "picture" generated so much exceptional work! The memory of it is thrilling for me. Thanks for this reminder and Rockwell info!

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