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Rockwell painted civil rights portraits, too |
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Written by TRACY-ANN TAYLOR
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FORT LAUDERDALE — There is a popular belief that the late Norman
Rockwell, a legendary illustrator and storyteller, only painted
whimsical images of middle-class white people in suburbs, and ignored
the racial and social issues of his time.
This notion is disproven by “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman
Rockwell,” a traveling exhibit created by the Rockwell Museum in
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that spans the artist’s 65-year career.
While the exhibit showcases 42 of Rockwell’s original oil paintings, as
well as his 323 Saturday Evening Post covers, sketches, photographs and
other documents, it also highlights some of his civil rights paintings.
One of them depicts a black girl’s mistreatment as she integrates a
white school.
“Norman Rockwell captures a universal humanity that we intuitively
understand,’’ said Irvin Lippman, curator of the Museum of Art-Fort
Lauderdale, in a prepared statement. The exhibit is currently on
display at the museum until Feb. 10.
“He paints real people and he shows real emotions,’’ Lipmman said. “His
work is inspirational. His work is beautiful. He paints about the best
within all of us.”
One of the most beloved American artists of the 20th century, Rockwell
worked at the Post for 47 years, drawing images that would be reprinted
as the news magazine’s cover.
Because the Post’s subscribers were largely well-to-do whites, Rockwell
was constrained there to narrative paintings of the everyday lives of
ordinary white people. The magazine required that black people only be
seen in service positions.
Rockwell, born 1894 and raised in Manhattan, New York, acknowledged
that except for a few summers in the country, his paintings were not a
realistic or historical representation of his or anyone else’s life in
America at that time, even though he experienced issues such as the
economic hardship of the Great Depression, World War II and racism.
In his 1960 autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, he wrote:
“The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and
ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.”
Rockwell continued 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.”
After leaving the Post in 1963 Rockwell diverted from his familiar
themes of family, friendship and community in societal bliss, and
started to illustrate current events for Look magazine.
Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, his first illustration for Look,
published in January 1964, was The Problem We All Live With, based on
the real-life story of Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old girl who, in 1960,
became the first African-American child to attend an all-white school
in New Orleans.
It was not the sort of work expected from Rockwell, who went from
idealism to realism. In the painting, a little black girl dressed in
white is escorted on her first day to school by four faceless U.S.
Marshals, the wall behind them defaced with the N-word and the messy
red gush of a tomato that someone threw at her.
Rockwell was a member of the early NAACP, long before he began this
painting, and even wrote a $1,000 check to the movement in the 1950s,
according to Laurie Norton Moffatt, director and CEO of the Norman
Rockwell Museum.
“He was very socially concerned, but he wasn’t able to paint that in
the Post because of editorial policies,” Moffatt said. “I think it was
very liberating for him as well to be able to paint on a wider spectrum
of subjects, and was particularly able to create a bridge for people to
see the unfairness, the anger, the meanness, and the injustices that
were happening to our children all over the United States.”
Freshly liberated, Rockwell tried to fix the discrepancies in his
previous works at the Post by demonstrating the dark side of American
life that he had long overlooked. For this, he received many harsh
criticisms.
Rockwell continued to paint works such as Murder in Mississippi (1965),
a black-and-white painting of the 1964 brutal murders of civil rights
workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.
Based on Hector Rondon’s “Aid from the Padre,” a 1963 Pulitzer-winning
photograph of Father Manuel Padillo holding a wounded soldier during a
revolt against the Venezuelan government, the piece is dismal, the only
color being Chaney’s blood. Rockwell used his son, Jarvis, to pose as
Michael Schwerner and hold Oliver McCary, who posed as James Chaney, to
stage numerous photographs that initiated the masterpiece.
The section of the Fort Lauderdale museum dedicated to the painting
includes these and other photographs, digital prints, preliminary
sketches, handwritten and typed notes of the event and victims, and a
1964 New York Times article of the murders; suggesting that Rockwell
planned on doing the piece long before he actually started, according
to the museum’s curators.
Rockwell continued to paint other newsworthy events until his death in 1978 at age 84.
“All of Rockwell’s works are about individuals, and each of those
individuals is imbued by Rockwell with a deep sense of humanity and
dignity,” Lippman said. “In each work, he tells a story. He’s really a
genius at his craft.”
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Photo: “The Problem We All Live With,” a painting by Norman Rockwell,
depicts a 6-year-old girl who integrated an all-white school in New
Orleans in 1960.
IF YOU GO
What: American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell exhibition
When: Now through Feb. 7, 2010.
Where: Museum of Art-Fort Lauderdale, 1 East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale.
Cost: Individual tickets are $15 for adults, $12.50 for seniors 65 and
over, and $8 for students ages 6 to 17. Group rates are available for
groups of 10 or more by calling 954-462-0222.
Contact: To learn more, call 954-525-5500 or visit www.moafl.org.
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