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But like an unrequited lover, he worshiped the physical world from afar. It's hard to name another 20th century artist with a greater appreciation for physical matter.
It's not always easy to tell from the way Rockwell's work has been reproduced in cheap magazines. But compare this printed cover for the Saturday Evening Post:
with the big, glowing original painting hanging on the wall at the Rockwell museum:
His description of the girl's plastic raincoat is a tour de force:
Notice the attention he paid to the rim on the lid of the paint can, or the bottle of medium, or the scuffed shoe:
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Similarly, there is nothing formulaic about Rockwell's treatment of the wooden box. Those lines are not straight because Rockwell understood and cared about how the box had been treated on its voyage through the material world. Here is intense, honest observation:
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For another example, in the corner of Rockwell's painting of a pharmacist...
... you can see that he didn't neglect the bottles, the test tube, the spoon. Importantly, these obsessive details are not described with photographic realism, as Rockwell's thousands of clueless imitators would surely have painted them. They are expressed through the loving eyes of someone with rapturous appreciation for their physical qualities...
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There have been other great materialists in art before Rockwell. Vermeer and the golden age Dutch painters delighted in the properties of fine material objects: the textures and patterns of lovely fabrics and tapestries, the sheen of metals, the soft feel of furs.
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| Note Gabriel Metsu's attention to the gold frame and oriental rug |
Renaissance art was also a period of great materialists. Freed from the medieval focus on the supernatural (and spurred on by the invention of soap) Renaissance painters obsessed over the surfaces of the secular world-- the nuances of human flesh and the reflections of armor.
Norman Rockwell was a true materialist in that tradition and, in my view, can walk proudly in that company.
15 comments:
I would just like you to know that while I don't comment, I really do appreciate your blog posts.
Very nice post David - a pleasure to look at and read.
The thing about unrequited love is that it's the capacity to be in love that really counts, and Rockwell's paintings, like all great art, are realisations of self-sufficient enchantment.
Love the chiselled physicality of the turquoise raincoat painting, and the accurate but lively, buttery brushwork.
Character adds to story because it evokes. While Rockwell's painterly rendering during this period of his career is spectacular and juicy, the end here is character, not physicality per se.
The fewer the elements in a picture, the more important the selection process for each, because each choice then becomes an essential building block of the image.
Those few included elements and props need to then, alone evoke the entire story world, the characters, the tone, and the emotions. So the character of each element must be quite intensely realized to do that.
In Harvey Dunn's teaching he spoke of a Spanish Banister in a student's historical picture. And how just that one banister alone needed to evoke the entire world of Old Spain with all its romance and mystery. Because there was little else in the picture that could provide that information to the audience. The world outside is outside the picture frame.
Look at each object in Rockwell's pictures and you will see that each has a character that evokes a whole world - era, technology, culture, geography - and an emotional overtone that would otherwise not be present.
This is why Rockwell was so driven about getting not just the perfect models for his work, but the the proper props and clothing as well. Even once offering a farmer on a country road the brand new clothes off his back in exchange for the farmer's worn, filthy, and smelly overalls; an offer which was accepted.
David, The images and your commentary reminds me of this insight of Chesterton:
"I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.”
Materialism is underrated, and there are few celebrants. As Wallace Stevens noted: "The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world . . ."
Thanks for the great post.
How big are the Rockwell paintings? I am wondering how much they have reduced them for printing. Thanks.
Richard-- Thanks for letting me know. It's great fun for me to write these but it's far greater to hear that someone is reading them. Pleasure shared, as they say, is pleasure doubled.
chris bennett-- Agreed. You don't get the motivation to maintain Rockwell's standards, sitting in your studio for decade after decade, without a whole lot of self-sufficient enchantment.
Laurence John-- Yes, isn't that a honey of a painting? No shortcuts, not one square inch.
Kev Ferrara-- I would say that much of the character comes from Rockwell's treatment of the material world. Rockwell was frequently criticized for his idealized view of the world but I think that's partially a misdiagnosis. I think a portion of the wholesome glow that seems to pervade his material objects came from Rockwell being on the outside, his nose pressed against the window pane like one of Dickens' impoverished street urchins viewing a Christmas dinner. His hunger for being a physical creature infuses his painted objects with a character that would not be manifest in a photograph of a Spanish bannister or a farmer's worn overalls, no matter how carefully they were selected.
His hunger for being a physical creature infuses his painted objects with a character that would not be manifest in a photograph of a Spanish bannister or a farmer's worn overalls, no matter how carefully they were selected.
I fully agree that Rockwell's spirit infused the character of everything he portrayed (at this stage of his career at least.) I thought that went without saying.
I'm just puzzled by the idea that one can discern that Rockwell was "longing for materiality" or hungry to be a "physical creature" by virtue of how well and poetically he captured the character of objects in his paintings.
As I pointed out, it is just as much a storytelling choice as an artistic proclivity.
Are you asserting that realistic rendering itself expresses an artist's desire to be more physical? Does this apply to Courbet? Richard Estes? Boris Vallejo?
Or does that only apply to Rockwell because he was rather scrawny and portrayed several scrawny boys in his pictures who longed to be strong and/or handsome/romantic?
Let's not forget, Rockwell had three wives, three kids and took hiking trips. Let's also not forget that painting is a grueling physical and tactile endeavor (even though it requires constant reflection).
Wes-- Two great quotes, thanks. Chesterton's quote is pretty damn cocky.
And Erasmus said, "Anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love, and the further he can move out of himself into his love, the happier he is."
Anonymous-- The originals are large, at least 4 or 5 times the size of the printed version. They are extremely powerful on the wall.
Kev Ferrara-- Actually, I do think the physicality of Boris' paintings exhibits all the profundity of someone who pumps iron.
As for Rockwell, I'm well aware that I'm the one who started us down this path, but Deborah Solomon's discredited biography of Rockwell makes me reluctant to delve too deeply into psychoanalyzing Rockwell. Rockwell's own autobiography describes in detail the torment of those early years when he was "a beanpole without the bean," and ascribes to that his motivation to become good at art-- a motivation that seems to have powered him most of his life. His children reported how he would get up from holiday meals and go back to his studio to paint. Yes, he did have three wives although rather than pursue a hot blooded wench he seems to have preferred shy, psychologically troubled, intellectual, sometimes suicidal partners.
My point is more that the very props Rockwell selected with such care (we agree on this) could be painted in a fairly mechanical way (by, for example, a Steven Dohanos type) or it could be painted, with much greater time and effort, by an artist who loved and reveled in the material qualities of the objects he painted.
I do think the physicality of Boris' paintings exhibits all the profundity of someone who pumps iron.
On the other hand, not lifting weights is a sign of profound metabolic ignorance.
My point is more that the very props Rockwell selected with such care (we agree on this) could be painted in a fairly mechanical way (by, for example, a Steven Dohanos type) or it could be painted, with much greater time and effort, by an artist who loved and reveled in the material qualities of the objects he painted.
We've come into full agreement.
Very nice thread, here. I lived Near Albany, NY 50 years ago and visited Stockbridge, Massachusetts from time to time. Rockwell was still alive and living around the corner from the Red Lion Inn. There was a small museum devoted to him in a house across the street. Back then, I was into demography and not art, so I sorta bought into the prevalent take on him and his work.
Since then, I visited an exhibit of his work in Tacoma WA (I live north of Seattle), and visited the new Rockwell Museum perhaps three times. Those few visits were important to my changing evaluation of his work. This fits with the point you made comparing the low-quality (by today's standards, but pretty high quality back then) of the reproductions compared to the originals.
Rockwell's reputation continues to climb and will continue to do as as more folks see his works in the original.
The museum has reconstructed Norman Rockwell's studio. It's awesome to see.
This is a late comment, (as I just saw this blog post), and of no great moment, but I moved to NYC (Manhattan) in 1981 and lived there until the end of 2021. For all those 40+ years, I lived just three blocks south and three blocks west of the apartment where Norman Rockwell was born (West 103rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue).
One and a half blocks directly west of Rockwell's birth home is the building where Humphrey Bogart was born (West 103rd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue).
Bogart's mother, incidentally, was a prominent illustrator of the early 20th Century, Maud Humphrey. I'm mentioning this to keep the topic tied to "illustration" ;-).
Thank you, I had never seen the master's work so close. It is truly fascinating.
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