Norman Rockwell (46 page)

Peter, the family bookworm they all kidded about being a “junior encyclopedia,” was admitted to the school, which turned out to be mediocre, but he enjoyed deeply the after-school programs geared toward the children of an affluent community, including a ride in the Goodyear blimp. His father took him to movie sets at least three times, where he got to meet Vic Damone and John Wayne, among other stars; and the Barstows brought him to Pasadena many weekends to play canasta with them. “I remember my grandfather as being especially kind to me,” he says. “Other adults never asked what I wanted to do, but he did, and he even arranged for me to attend a Rose Bowl game that everyone else assumed I was too young to want to see.”

Back East, the two older boys were feeling somewhat estranged from their family, by both distance and anxiety. Jerry, a senior, began to make such poor grades that it soon became clear that he would not graduate that year. When he called his father to discuss his unhappiness, Rockwell suggested that he drop out of school and come spend the semester with them. Joe Mugnaini had already arranged to combine some business in New England with driving Rockwell’s car back to California, so Jerry could just catch a ride with him and his wife.

“I’m not sure it’s the best advice to have given me,” Jarvis laughs now. “I mean, shouldn’t a father encourage his son, especially a high school senior, to stay in school?” But Jerry jumped at the chance to leave Oakwood. Once he was ensconced in Los Angeles, he enrolled at Hollywood High, where he enjoyed for the first time being merely one among a large group of celebrities’ children. Still, he failed to earn the credits he needed for graduation.

“I took some painting lessons during this period, and my dad thought I was talented. We decided that when we returned home, I’d enroll in art school.” Was Rockwell fearful of his eldest pursuing such a competitive, uncertain field, especially in his own wake? “My father was actually very happy that his son would be an artist. He loved art, and he liked that I was continuing in that tradition.”

Throughout the winter, Rockwell kept busy working on several elaborate
Post
covers, including
Roadblock
and
New Television Antenna,
both of which, in their starkly different ways, rehearse the illustrator’s interest in the passage of time. A dizzying grid of carefully worked out angles guides Rockwell’s construction of these complex, busy covers; they register a new authority in Rockwell’s painting. The pieces also presage the massing of detail and filling in of space that becomes the hallmark of Rockwell’s greatest work in the 1950s.
Roadblock
reveals a large moving truck marked “Pepies,” almost wedged in between two apartment walls, thwarted not by the challenge of bricks and mortar, but by a small bulldog parked obstinately in its path. Neighbors appear from everywhere to gawk in amazement, including two immaculately dressed black children in the front of the pictorial space. In
New Television Antenna,
the notion of progress is represented by the man struggling to put up the television antenna on his roof, with a church steeple’s faint cross behind the house echoing the antenna’s wire angles. According to his sons, Rockwell didn’t actually watch television in 1949 but was still a holdout for the radio. Neither, of course, did he go to church.

For both paintings, he used students and professors as his models, giving them a chance to see how elaborately staged his photography sessions were, as well as to observe his considerable prowess as a director. Throughout the months at the Art Institute, he also cordially invited interested parties to his studio to watch his methodical, if sometimes agonized, approach to painting. Although he varied the steps depending on the project, Rockwell typically projected onto a canvas the photographs he wanted to use, and then roughed them in by tracing them with a pencil or charcoal. At this stage, the tracings looked more like squiggles than drawings, and if he was sure ahead of time what part of a photograph he would employ (the tilt of a man’s head, the shape of an apple), he felt comfortable having his assistant—in California, a Hollywood photographer named Pete Todd—trace the image, since he mostly used it just to arrange his composition. Although advances were made in projectors over the next few decades, Rockwell stuck by his Bausch and Lomb model, the Balopticon that he had used from the early stages of his career, when he used to pro-ject his sketches instead of photographs. He touted it to his students as an evil necessity, essential for enabling the illustrator to meet deadlines, but deadly if the artist stopped practicing his free drawing out of laziness enabled by the machine.

After he’d used as many of the photographs as he felt efficient, Rockwell would next make a detailed, finely tuned charcoal sketch. Then, he would project that sketch onto the linen canvas, usually thirty-three by forty-four inches, larger than the
Post
cover reproduction. He approached the covers as if they were art for himself, not a commercial patron, and treated them as if painting stories for people to look at directly, not something for commercial reproduction. Any concessions he made to mass reproduction dealt with clarity of storyline; because, according to marketers, the audience needed to grasp the meaning within two seconds, he exaggerated facial expressions to convey the emotion immediately. Such belief in the integrity of his painting stood behind his unusual practice of framing his painting before delivering it to Philadelphia.

Also uncommon was Rockwell’s practice of painting a complete color oil “sketch” before starting the final picture, so that he could work out the color scheme to his satisfaction. These sketches were often highly finished, and some critics preferred them to his finished covers, because the painting was usually looser. It had only been in the previous few years that the illustrator realized that his various sketches and charcoal renderings were valuable to collectors, as well as the final oils. When he found out that people in the Los Angeles art community owned some of his early work from the twenties, he traded the sketches of his current projects for the older pieces, since the studio fire of 1943 had left him bereft of his work prior to that year.

Throughout the spring, Rockwell lectured at special classes, judged local beauty contests, and entertained journalists such as Hedda Hopper, who coyly reported in her gossip column that Samuel Goldwyn had roped the artist into doing a portrait of one of the mogul’s favorite actresses. In his autobiography, Rockwell went further, claiming that the producer hired him to paint the ads for a movie until the illustrator decried the inauthentic costumes, offending Goldwyn. Jarvis Rockwell’s memory of the Hollywood connection is twofold: the family’s fear of what his mother might awkwardly announce when Hedda Hopper was around, and the standing invitation, infrequently accepted, for the kids to use Walt Disney’s swimming pool whenever they wished. According to Diane Disney Miller, Disney’s daughter, Clyde Forsythe was a good friend of her father’s, and it seems likely that Disney and Rockwell first met through Clyde’s introduction on one of the earlier California vacations.

Rockwell was also busy during this period helping Al Dorne establish what he excitedly believed would be an innovative way to reach America’s talented heartland. Dorne’s earlier suggestion that Rockwell think how he might participate in such a project was serious: a prominent group of American illustrators, Rockwell among them, discussed the best way to organize the proposed correspondence school in New York, to be called the Institute of Commercial Art. Al Dorne thought the school could work in conjunction with the prestigious, nonprofit Society of Illustrators, of which he was currently the president. The Society had to back out of the arrangement, partly because of New York education laws and conflicts regarding nonprofit organizations, and Dorne relocated the project to Westport, Connecticut, where rents were cheaper and where many of the teachers already lived. According to an interview Rockwell gave in the late 1960s, in its early stages, the school negotiated an exchange with Yale University, although those connected with Yale’s art department as well as with the Famous Artists’ School remain flummoxed at Rockwell’s revelation.

Rockwell’s initial enthusiasm for the project, however, seems well founded. According to Walt Reed—the author of important texts on the history of illustration, and the owner of New York’s Illustration House, a prominent gallery of the nation’s premier illustrations from the last 150 years—the course was the best ever devised for the study of illustration. Founded on the principle of postgraduate education for talented illustrators, the school asked twelve top artists to devise a course of study based on their own methods of producing their work. The proposed format would allow the enrolled students to receive instructions and critiques of their work, through the mail, from the painter with whom they had signed up. The teachers also would gather a couple of times a year at the school to compare general notes and to offer a few special classes.

During its first months of operation in 1949, students were allowed to pick the teacher they wanted to study with, but after 90 percent of them chose Rockwell, the consortium of instructors revamped the curriculum, so that every student would receive one lesson from each of the twelve teachers. Even this concept was predicated on more advanced students than those who actually enrolled, however, and, finally, the course of study devolved into a covey of well-respected but less famous instructors hired to teach from a four-volume compilation based on the original twelve instructors’ lessons and to critique the students’ work themselves. The original twelve faculty members offered workshops twice a year for these teachers and, during those times, they demonstrated how they would choose to respond to various students’ submissions.

Al Dorne was the perfect person to spearhead such an institution. Championing the profession of illustration, he was frequently outspoken: “I understand there is a fine line drawn here between what are considered two kinds of art—fine art and commercial art. In fact, there are two kinds of art: good art and bad art. That is the only difference.” Dorne’s school was on the cutting edge of education, providing big-city advantages to small-town customers, a democratizing of higher education that appealed greatly to Rockwell. His own scrupulous account of his working methods shows how seriously he continued to take the role of teacher, and the lessons became the basis for his book
Rockwell on Rockwell,
which, along with Arthur Guptill’s text, remains the most thorough explanation of his techniques in existence.

While her husband was growing stronger on the West Coast, from both a change of atmosphere and the excitement of burning new tracks, Mary Rockwell was merely surviving. Newspaper interviews with her, in which she rather listlessly claims that the job of a famous painter’s wife is to encourage him to maintain his integrity, are accompanied by photographs that show a woman with sad, tired eyes. “I’ve wanted always to feel that [my husband] was confiding his purposes in his art to me,” she said, “and that I would never stand in his way of accomplishing it for any selfish reasons of my own.” A little later, she adds, “A creative artist never stands still. He goes either backward or forward. And it’s somehow the wife’s job to help her husband grow.”

It is hard to see how Mary Rockwell could have felt very important during this period. Rockwell got more attention than ever, between the camaraderie and interest of new colleagues, and the numbers of awed students following him around the campus of the Los Angeles Art Institute growing weekly. When the projected course to be team-taught by Mugnaini and Rockwell was announced for the summer, it filled immediately.

The illustrator’s newfound celebrity included an increase in the numbers of visitors invited to his studio to respond to his current work-in-progress. Mary was used to the communal criticism that Rockwell compulsively solicited. Although his closest friends joked that he ended up doing what he thought best anyway, his recruitment of advice was, in fact, as genuine and interested as the flattered spectators believed. “He’d invite people into his studio to critique, and watch their faces to see if they instantly got the picture or not,” Mary Schafer recalls. “We all felt we were contributing to an important thing. He’d take in all the opinions—and the next day he’d discard them all.” Only Mary Rockwell’s opinion carried true critical weight. Although this dynamic remained in place in Hollywood, she was nonetheless encountering increased numbers of outsiders who clearly believed their judgments significant to Rockwell’s work just when she was feeling more fragile emotionally than she had ever been.

As the family prepared to return to Vermont at the end of the summer in 1949, Jerry announced that his interest in pursuing a professional career had crystallized; he felt sure it was the right thing to do. Rockwell immediately devised a plan that he thought might help everyone, including Mary, who would be comforted by having her sons nearby: they would insist that Tommy, who was very happy at Oakwood, return to Arlington High School, and Rockwell would build a studio for Jerry adjacent to his. Jerry could attend the Art Students League in Manhattan for a few months, then come home to his own professional setup next to his father’s.

In fact, the beautiful studio was almost an exact (smaller) replica of Rockwell’s own. And while his eldest son was pleased, he was also somewhat intimidated to be working under the literal shadow of his overly disciplined father. Nonetheless, he did go to the New York school where Rockwell had begun his career, and during those months, he even spent some time studying at the National Academy of Design as well.

Back home, it turned out to be especially fortunate that Tommy, in many ways the easiest child, with his good looks, high grades, and easy affability, had stayed home with Peter to help keep his mother company. Rockwell became engrossed in yet another career crisis, this time emanating from the
Post
’s art director. For years, as the illustrators had seen their independence eroding, they had been tense about the increasing power invested in such positions. So far, Rockwell had held his ambivalence in check and had experienced no reason to doubt his autonomy. But the previous year, Ken Stuart had pushed the artist too hard, both in requesting that he paint Stuart’s ideas rather than his own, and in suggesting minor changes in the finished products. This fall, Stuart overplayed his hand.