Norman Rockwell (13 page)

In other words, when Rockwell entered the Golden Age, it was already flirting with its own demise.

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The Art Students League proved perfect for Rockwell and he flourished in its midst. Here, the surroundings reassured him that he was on his way: the League occupied the upper three floors of a five-story building, a total of more than eleven thousand square feet of floor space. The students had access to spacious studios, a members’ room, a clubroom, a boardroom, the director’s office, an art store, and a “refectory” where they could prepare their own food. Always (even painfully) sensitive to his physical surroundings, Rockwell now exuded a palpable self-confidence that had been quietly taking root the past few years. His talent and his tenacity combined to impress his fellow students that he was bound, out of all of them, to succeed.

In spite of the putative liberality toward aesthetic categories, the illustration students were, nonetheless, at times put on the defensive by the “pure artists.” Even though Rockwell explained his choice to pursue illustration by asserting the familiar conundrum that “there was not such a clear divide at the time between fine arts and illustration,” the distinction roiled the waters at times. One day, for instance, when one of the “lunchroom crowd” (students who “wore beards and soft wide-brimmed hats and chatted about art all day long over cups of coffee in the lunchroom”) cornered him in the school cafeteria to exclaim in a mixture of “scorn and awe,” that “you know, if I worked as hard as you do, I could be as good as Velázquez,” Rockwell’s answer was swift: “Why don’t you?” Wounded by the jibes of young colleagues headed toward “serious” (noncommercial) careers, he welcomed the chance to recommend his own discipline to those whose sloth he disdained.

Most of all, Rockwell’s study of his illustrious mentors convinced him that his pleasure in being mass-reproduced—his awareness that in contrast to the static and limited nature of a museum painting, his own works were being disseminated to as large an audience as any artist could dream—fed on pride similar to what Howard Pyle felt as America assumed the mantle of world-class illustration around the time of Rockwell’s birth. Pyle’s convictions could have been Rockwell’s own, almost twenty years later. As Pyle’s biographer declares about the father of American illustration: “He felt a sense of security in the niche he had climbed to. He was part of America, a land of prodigious appetites . . . The country hungered for pictures and was beginning to devour them at an extraordinary rate. . . . He knew that the illustrator was the artist of the people. He and his fellow illustrators confronted an opportunity no artists of the past had enjoyed.”

Rockwell turned his work ethic into an essential part of his identity, claiming that because of his natural addiction to a schedule he never missed a meal. Others might speak of inspiration and vision; to him, art, imagination, and creation flourished when sleep, meals, and pay were dispensed at predictable intervals. When the yearly student ball and drunken revelries came round, he and his friends sanctimoniously locked their doors so they could continue working, rather than join the “pure artists” at their debaucheries—though he did once admit, “I really got into the ball at the end, and the silly parade downtown—I just didn’t have time to join in the preparations ahead of time.” When he paused long enough to reflect, he did occasionally worry that his regular habits argued against him being an innate, real artist. “Being somebody to my parents and brother and to my friends in Mamaroneck meant a lot to me. I wasn’t a rebel,” he declared, explaining his choice to become an illustrator; he wanted to make his family proud.

Aside from everything else, a major distinction—perhaps the most important one until World War I—between artists who chose illustration and those who pursued easel painting lay in the social objectives of each group. In the twentieth century, artists were increasingly expected to paint from inside out, to create their paintings, whatever the ostensible subject, from the heart and soul of their solitude. Inner sight and inspiration trumped what seemed the pallid competition of mere recording.

Such interiority was the legacy of Romanticism, so that even the allegiance of the Impressionists a generation before to the external world of nature was deliberately filtered by their subjectivity, by their awareness that different viewpoints would change the object before them. However alien their world appeared to the Cubists of early Modernism, a similar privileging of inward vision held.

Illustrators, however, saw their task as reflecting faithfully the world they inhabited, if at times through the defamiliarizing lens of art. Imitating life at its most tedious, its idealized best, and its tragic worst, illustrators would find it much harder to claim the God-like mantle of the creator that modern artists could invoke. By personality, illustrators therefore tended to be more gregarious, more extroverted, more social creatures than fine artists, who relied on their feelings and intuitions to produce masterworks. And for people like Rockwell, who avoided exploring his emotions in any depth, the chance to create his art by reflecting narratively on the world was a godsend for the low-level depression that seemed to dog him. The often ungodly schedule that illustrators kept, wedded to their easels, locked into commissions and deadlines that fine artists considered anathema to inspiration, suited his impulse to channel his energies into his work.

Regardless of their academic tracks, many students, Rockwell included, found themselves performing odd jobs in order to pay their living costs and school fees. At first, he drew various stages of fetuses contained in jars at a local hospital; next, he worked the eight-to-midnight shift at Child’s Restaurant at Fifty-ninth Street and Columbus Circle, too quiet a location during the evening hours to avoid boredom or make any money, in spite of the location’s colorful evolution into a “cafeteria society” for homosexual men in the know. One day, in the middle of complaining about the lifeless job, Rockwell was interrupted by his sympathetic listener, an art school friend, who invited his colleague to try out his own part-time work. Within hours, the illustrator had fallen into a job that energized rather than enervated him—he was hired as an extra at the Metropolitan Opera. Rockwell, his love of the theatrical well established, thrilled to the larger-than-life aspect of grand opera, from the bizarre costumes he wore, to the chance to occupy the “jockey seat” in the elephant’s head during
Aïda,
from which position he worked the pachyderm’s trunk, affording him unlimited opportunities to play the boyish pranks he still loved. The young man reported this job proudly to his parents, whose collection of opera recordings had been one of the few cultural signposts that Rockwell felt distinguished them from the far Upper West Side hoi polloi. Waring and Nancy couldn’t help being impressed when Enrico Caruso, a talented caricaturist himself, befriended their son, charmed by the exuberance of the two art students backstage and impressed by their drawing skills.

Drawing necessarily occupied most of Norman’s time that he didn’t spend in school or at the Met. Luckily, Thomas Fogarty, sensitively aware of his students’ financial needs as well as their various abilities, helped the ambitious young man procure his first professional assignment. In 1912, when he was eighteen years old, a commission to illustrate twelve
Tell-Me-Why
stories brought Rockwell some financial security and visibility, so that in spite of earlier assignments, he came to consider this his first real publication. The collection by C. H. Claudy was published by McBride Nast and Company as a question-answer sequence, an early parent-child interactive book. Although as a mature artist Rockwell chuckled over these early pieces, several of them hold up well as examples of a broad-brushed romantic technique, large blocks of graduated grays opposing bold use of open space. His dramatic use of simplified form to achieve focus even hinted vaguely at a fashionable orientalism that bordered on the surreal.

Fortified by this proof that his career was truly under way, Rockwell decided that the right working space would be crucial to enabling him to meet deadlines. Recalling his first studio, rented on the strength of the
Tell-Me-Why
stories, Rockwell enjoyed explaining how he and an equally naïve friend had, unknowingly, leased the attic room above a brothel. Only when Waring—apparently in spite of his much-vaunted innocence—showed up and, looking around, immediately informed the boys of their mistake, did Rockwell realize why the pretty, friendly girls from below who visited the artists every so often seemed to have no regular work schedule. As interesting as Rockwell’s profession of almost bumpkinlike innocence is, his account of the worldly roommate in cahoots with him, equally unable to distinguish a bordello from an office, seems even more fanciful. “He’d say to me, ‘Sure, you want to be an illustrator. But you’ve gotta be a MAN’—he’d always say this in capital letters—‘first.’ I’d ask, ‘Can’t a woman be an illustrator?’ which would make him mad and we’d go at it, curse and insult, for an hour. But we were great friends.” It seems unlikely that such a guy couldn’t recognize a whorehouse.

In light of the number of stories Rockwell would tell over the years about bordellos that he did not recognize or enter, Uncle Samuel’s horrific death from familiarity “with too many ladies” made its mark on the nephew who observed the still young man’s excruciating demise. “My father was always nervous about sex,” Jarvis Rockwell recalls. And no wonder. Rockwell was thirteen years old when Sam died, the very age when his own sexual awareness and urges were taking front and center stage. The timing of the two events—one man dying from overly indulging urges similar to those the younger one was just now experiencing—could hardly have been worse.

Rockwell left the studio-cum-brothel immediately upon his father’s disclosure and found a bona fide space in Brooklyn, in the area today known as Brooklyn Heights. The studio stood next to the Brooklyn Bridge, and so the Fulton Street elevated railroad next door rattled the windows throughout the day. Large enough to contain several well-established artists as well as tradesmen and an irritatingly loud dental office, the building housed Rockwell’s afternoon illustration class instructor, Ernest Blumenschein, his presence legitimizing the wiser choice of space this time. Blumenschein was respected for his illustrations of Jack London, Willa Cather, and Booth Tarkington novels at a time when drawings for important books invoked Howard Pyle’s legacy. The instructor occasionally ambled over to Rockwell’s studio to seek models from the League students sharing the large space, thrilling them all with the chance to see how he worked.

At least the Brooklyn studio provided Rockwell with some distance, however abbreviated, from his difficult family. By the end of 1911, Father Rockwell had moved back to Manhattan, probably because Nancy had complained that caring for the elderly man was too difficult for her. She was having more trouble than usual with her “nerves”; vague family records suggest that the Rockwells moved into a boardinghouse on Palmer Street, a few blocks from the home on Prospect. On May 13, a month after the boys graduated from Sunday school, Waring submitted his resignation to the St. Thomas vestry. The family moved into a socially modest Manhattan boardinghouse, primarily—according to the vague explanation the parents gave their sons—because of Nancy’s increasingly poor health. She was simply not up to the demands of taking care of a household, Rockwell would later explain, whenever he discussed his parents.

Norman’s resentment at being reduced to life at the boardinghouse “among people I didn’t like and couldn’t respect” “choked” him, and embarrassment motivated him to give no Manhattan address to the League to substitute for either Mamaroneck residence. He would never forget the “utter silence of a rented room in a boardinghouse,” and the failure of people to live in proper family units that the place represented to him. The common suspicion that such close quarters bred opportunities for easy morals was well founded, if only because of the compressed opportunities the boardinghouses afforded: “Our objection to the Institution of Boarding may be all summed up in one sentence,” worried one earnest reformer. “As our virtues are much more dependent on our surroundings than we are willing to admit, when the check of home is removed (and a boardinghouse is, emphatically, NOT a home) all sorts of evil are likely to rush in.” Thomas Fogarty’s ferreting out for Rockwell the odd illustration job here and there was partly due to his awareness of the family’s reduced conditions, not a distinction the proud young artist, finally making a name for himself through his talent, wanted to maintain.

He was furious at his mother, but he let the anger simmer rather than express it. He blamed her for the family’s entrenchment in the down-at-the heels midtown boardinghouse. And he held her responsible for Waring having to resign precipitously from the vestry, citing that his wife’s health dictated his absence “for a time.” The other vestry members sent the conscientious Episcopalian a warm letter of praise, celebrating his “unfailing patience” with the minutiae of church business. He had provided “a comfort to the vestry and a service of real value to the history of the parish.” Norman, convinced of his mother’s incompetence and selfishness, believed that choosing a boardinghouse over a place of their own was damaging self-indulgence on Nancy’s part. Yes, it was convenient for her to have nothing to worry about—from cooking, even buying groceries, to cleaning, to doing laundry. The boardinghouse took care of everything, all for one payment each month. But other women provided their families with a normal home; why was she special?

Without his parents, Rockwell had finally enjoyed big city life. He had saved on rent money by living at home, though he frequently kept late hours in Manhattan, sleeping over at his studio or at a friend’s apartment. Given his later continued financial support of mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, it is entirely possible that he had been contributing his income to his family for some time. And if his earnings helped to pay for housing, one can only imagine his entreaties to his parents to reconsider their move, especially in light of the dark visions he later, predictably, once again projected onto this subsequent domestic period of city life.