Norman Rockwell (12 page)

The National Academy of Design was not at its strongest during this period; beginning to look stodgy and dated rather than impressively pedigreed, it had failed to negotiate a place for itself in the newly emerging art world scene. Although William Merritt Chase had bet on Manhattan assuming the art world’s lead by now, he was off by a few decades at least. Modernism had stormed Europe, and its sonic waves put American artists on the alert that they needed to catch up. The Armory Show, which would install European Modernism as the beau ideal, was only two years away. The Academy, in spite of the continental avant-garde, still stressed painting based on narrative content. At least the school-trained illustrators and easel painters alike agreed on the fundamentals of painting, insisting that artists be able to execute the academic idea of “the basics,” regardless of their professional goals.

If a certain moribund air hung over the Academy in 1910, its Old World methods had been indicted as early as July 1875, when students and faculty broke away to found the Art Students League, a student-run organization housed in a twenty-by-thirty-foot “cockloft” on the fourth floor of a building at 108 Fifth Avenue. The League had grown from a handful of malcontents to a school attracting thousands of students from all over the world. It didn’t take long before Rockwell, who had heard about the edgier and more egalitarian League from students at the Academy, found himself at their permanent quarters at 215 West Fifty-seventh Street. Here, in keeping with the League’s democratic method of encouraging young artists to plot their own course of study, teachers’ names were listed on a central board for students to take their pick of the lot.

By the time he entered the Art Students League, Rockwell was almost certain that he wanted to be an illustrator. The Art Students League, progressive and stridently proud of it, approached illustration with the same seriousness that it did pure painting. By now, Howard Pyle’s efforts to deracinate from illustration classes the taint of femininity, of being a more decorative career than real painting, had paid off: illustration was serious and worthy artistic work that, admittedly, proved a bit too financially lucrative to be in the same category as fine art but still stopped short of the commercial pablum of advertising.

Rockwell later claimed he more or less flipped a coin when he first stood in the corridors of the Art Students League; knowing nothing about any of the professors, he randomly chose to study anatomy with George Bridgman and illustration with Thomas Fogarty. The first was a well-known life studies teacher, the second an accomplished draftsman who taught a techniques course culled heavily from his own professional experiences. In later accounts of the role that chance played in his studies, Rockwell meant to sanction implicitly the prodigious range of his innate abilities; he could just as easily have ended up in Kenneth Miller’s course, he said, which would have made him a modernist instead of an illustrator. In reality, Rockwell was too directed a student, too savvy not to have asked around before selecting his instructors. And he fails to mention that he studied with not one but two illustration teachers during this all-important first year—Fogarty and Ernest Blumenschein. The doubling-up implies “an unusual dedication to illustration so early; it was highly unconventional to take more than one such course at a time,” according to League curator Pam Koob.

Thomas Fogarty’s importance to Rockwell’s career came as much from the publishing world contacts he generously fostered for his students, especially the best ones, as it did from his earnest and long-remembered exhortations to get inside the picture frame, to know what each person was feeling, thinking, and doing. Fogarty did enjoy some little renown: in 1907, for instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had purchased his sketch
Wee Annie,
an illustration for the popular magazine
Pearson’s.
But as Michele Bogart points out, this transaction occurred in conjunction with self-interested magazine companies pressuring the Met to create a separate department of illustration, a vision encouraged by Frederic Remington and contested by N. C. Wyeth. Rockwell himself would later comment that Fogarty was not a particularly good artist, but he was a very dedicated and caring teacher.

Fogarty taught from two modes, the classical and the pragmatic, and he depended on the old-fashioned method of emulation. First, he would summarize a story and ask the students to decide what elements were most ripe for representation; then he showed them reproductions of those stories’ illustrations done by Pyle or Abbey or Remington, explaining why each artist had made his particular choices. At the same time, the teacher solicited the “cheap magazines” for work he could hand out to his classes, and, whenever a student delivered an appropriate illustration, the publication would use it, a method that engendered minor income and the beginnings of a portfolio for the aspiring artist to show around town.

Under Fogarty’s impetus, Rockwell learned the importance of self-promotion; he even spent some of his hard-earned cash on having business cards printed: “Artist, Illustrator, Letterer, Cartoonist; sign painting, Christmas cards, calendars, magazine covers, frontispieces, still life, murals, portraits, layouts, design, etc.” Fogarty pushed Rockwell to get his work in front of a paying audience and, through his efforts, the young illustrator garnered enough small commissions that winning a League tuition scholarship at the end of his first year proved far less important than it would have the year before. His winning drawing is an illustration (probably assigned in class) of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village,” captioned with the verse “But in his duty prompt at every call, / he watched and wept, he prayed and felt, for all.” Within the context of this poem about a once bustling little village that industry kills, the lines refer to a town minister known for his compassion to anyone in need. Rockwell’s illustration of the man kneeling at the side of a dying villager is graceful, simple, and beautifully wrought from a technical point of view. From the floor to the framed painting above the headboard of the bed, the shading is subtle, multifarious, and precise. Already, Rockwell’s pleasure in rendering light sources appears in the reflection of the single candle illuminating the bed.

Over four decades later, his mind’s eye substituted a more personally significant scene for the winning picture. He described the scholarship drawing as portraying a bedridden boy gazing longingly at the Fourth of July fireworks cascading outside his window. By the time he was famous enough to command an audience for his autobiography, Rockwell no longer wanted to remember that he had once articulated the darker side of life more than competently. He furthered the illusion that from his beginnings as an artist, he’d illustrated only the wholesome side of life; somber deathbed scenes did not fit into his repertoire. Fireworks, however, functioned mnemonically as childhood excitement that failed to detonate fully, at the right time, in the right place. His father had short-fused Norman’s pleasure when he’d insisted that his sons modulate their ignitions into lighting one firework at a time, causing the boys to complicate the whole enterprise into nothing but one giant, hot disappointment. And there was Uncle Gil, too, who good-heartedly set off the works in the right way for his nephews—but during the dead of winter, not when they carried the cultural meaning the boys wanted to be part of. Rockwell’s winning scholarship picture, as he fantasized it, positioned a disappointed boy, yearning to be outside partaking in the timely celebration, sick in bed instead. Never fitting into the current scene at the best time—too late for the Golden Age of Illustration, too early to chance the modern age of painting—the grown man always believed he had missed the moment, in spite of his celebrity status.

If Thomas Fogarty encouraged Rockwell to get into the real work world fast, it was George Bridgman who inspired in him a love of perfectly executed drawing. Bridgman’s passion for the human body found elegant expression in his exquisite renderings of bones, muscles, and sinews, as well as the way they interacted during different torsions. Insisting that color and “lovely compositions” were secondary to the foundation of a painting, he frequently reminded his students that “you can’t paint a house until it’s built.” Bridgman’s fame was specifically, stubbornly confined to the student population, although that crowd included some illustrious acolytes over the years. In 1942,
Time
magazine claimed that his name was “as unfamiliar to the general public as it is familiar to practically every artist in the U.S.”

Bridgman taught as many as seventy thousand students through the first half of the twentieth century. He mesmerized his anatomy classes with his eccentric habits, which
Time
related with relish: he was well known for “carrying around a batch of wrist and finger bones in his pocket and earnestly examining them at odd moments on subways and in restaurants. At home he kept a hand pickled in glycerin and carbolic acid and studied it for weeks until putrefaction forced him to bury it in the garden to the horror of his Negro gardener. Once a taxi driver, aware of his interest in cadavers, appeared on his doorstep with a dismembered human leg that an unidentified medical student had left in his taxi.”

Rockwell always esteemed technical mastery. And he especially appreciated that such a great draftsman did not stint on his instructional duties. As Rockwell observed Bridgman’s talents, he noted approvingly that in spite of his brusque manner, the man clearly enjoyed teaching. Akin to Rockwell, he liked people, disdaining only those pretentious students who “dressed like artists, talked like critics, and loafed like pigs in summer.” “Prim and meticulous” as well as sardonic, Bridgman’s old-world gruffness seemed totally devoid of old-fashioned meanness, Rockwell later painstakingly explained. The League had encouraged a tradition of pugilistic painters from the beginning of the century, when Frederic Remington’s emphasis on ruggedness campaigned to undo the frequent association of the decorative and effeminate with art. George Bellows and then Thomas Hart Benton took up the cause a few decades before the rough-hewn Bridgman mentored Rockwell. Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky would eventually commandeer Bridgman’s studio when the accommodating instructor was absent and hold massive bathtub-gin bashes. That Rockwell, eager himself to be a “man’s man” but uncomfortable around such artificial manifestations of masculinity, grew so fond of Bridgman speaks volumes about both men.

Bridgman took stock of Rockwell as quickly as the student did his teacher, and he was equally impressed. As an adult, the illustrator would proudly recall how during the master’s legendary turns at each student’s easel, where he corrected the drawings with heavy black marks, he praised Norman’s painting as just right, while all the others needed more light. At times, however, when Bridgman charcoaled in a “heavy black line down the center” of Rockwell’s drawing, demonstrating how to obtain the “main line of the action . . . down
through
the hip,” the student groaned inwardly. Revealingly, he had established a ritual of taking the week’s painting home to show off to his parents, and now he would spend “all the next day laboriously trying to clean off Mr. Bridgman’s black line” before exhibiting the damaged project. But Bridgman took pains to ensure Rockwell understood his own worth; when he gave another student the winning number one for the week’s illustration, for instance, he consoled Rockwell that number two was actually better, since first place implied that the student’s talent lay in parroting back the lesson rather than expanding it with his own insights.

At Bridgman’s behest, Rockwell became class monitor, which meant he auditioned the models who posed nude as well as instructing them during the sessions. He and a few other students soon began a deeply satisfying routine of joining Bridgman at the end of each session: a janitor would provide the teacher with a beer and his acolytes would “flop down on the floor around him” and listen to his stories about Howard Pyle or Edwin Austin Abbey. Reveling in his company, the admiring young artists would look on in amazement as their teacher, between sips of beer, brilliantly sketched a muscle on a scrap of paper.

Almost as important to Rockwell as Bridgman’s own techniques and personality was the homage the great instructor paid to Howard Pyle, a former student at the League. Precisely because the decline of the Golden Age was already dimly perceived, if consciously denied, by students hoping to partake of its riches, Pyle, the illustrator who had ushered in the era, had become nearly God-like in their opinions. George Bridgman had trouble conducting class through his tears on November 9, 1911, the day that the fifty-eight-year-old Pyle died. Largely as a result of the vocation that Howard Pyle represented to Rockwell in fall 1911, the younger man felt that illustration offered him the chance to be a prominent contemporary artist as well as part of a great historical tradition. Although Pyle had become a kind of celebrity illustrator by the 1880s, publication of his stunning color illustrations had been forced to wait on the development of the four-color process of the early new century, so that in effect, Pyle had been allotted less than a decade in which to establish his brilliance as a colorist. Clearly, the way was paved for those capable of fulfilling the work the master had begun. But Howard Pyle proved to be only the first of the great illustrators to die during Rockwell’s tenure at the League; by the end of those two years alone, Edwin Austin Abbey and Frederic Remington were dead as well. Rockwell would eventually associate the death knell of the brief-lived Golden Age with their burials. For a good twenty years more illustration would hold its own, but the art had peaked a little too early for Rockwell to breathe its rarefied air.

The Golden Age was well enough established by this point that it was reasonable for Rockwell to believe he was entering an artistic field that could deliver, all in one package, artistic fulfillment, critical acclaim, and great wealth. Paradoxically, though, the very technologies that helped modern illustration gain its aesthetic foothold worked against its longevity, assuring its anachronistic status instead. Photography, a newer model of representation hot on its heels, ran only a pace behind radio, television, and talking movies, converting the public to a more highly charged, stimulating aesthetic than illustrators could conjure. Mere illustration, neither as realistic nor as fantastic as the images increasingly mass-produced by advanced technologies, lost its place fast. Even the new availability of cheaply mass-produced magazines and books, suddenly affordable to an undereducated or underexposed public previously inured to art, bore dangers for Rockwell’s profession, as well as immediate rewards: the quality of the illustrations decreased as the assignments were meted out to little experienced, low-paid, often less talented illustrators.