Norman Rockwell, His Faith, and His Legacy of Narrative Realism
PILGRIMAGE PERIGRINATION #1: Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge MA
The purpose of my recent visit to the East Coast, which started May 5 and ended a few days ago on May 16, was to travel as a pilgrim, not a tourist. The plan was to visit and later write about shrines from Quebec, Ontario, upstate New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts following a route that has been followed five times already by my traveling buddy Stewart Shipley—who would be guiding my friend Marie Aguilar and me as we accompanied him on his latest round of the shrines. (I grew up in Massachusetts, and so I was also happy I would be able to visit my sisters and some of their grandchildren and one great grandchild plus one old friend while we were there.)
When I told my part time boss Maggie Gallagher, Executive Director of B16 Institute I was going on this pilgrimage, Maggie suggested I consider collecting material and rewriting a book the institute has been considering publishing about St. Junipero Serra and the American Saints. Other writers have attempted it, but their drafts have not taken the approach she would like.
So we added research to our goal and extended our trip to visit one additional shrine, that of the North American Martyrs in Midland, Ontario. We also added a trip to Niagara Falls, just for fun. Even at the falls, I found a tie-in to the theme of Catholic exploration and evangelization of the continent, when we came across a plaque about how Fr. Louis Hennepin was the first European to describe that marvelous cataract. I plan to write a little more about Hennepin and Niagara and lots more about the shrines and the holy people and events they honor as time goes on.
Towards the end of our 1700+ mile drive, we visited Stockbridge Massachusetts and the National Shrine of Divine Mercy. I greatly admire Norman Rockwell, so of course while we were there we also had to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum, which is also in Stockbridge. Today I’ll write a little about the artist and his work. More about the Divine Mercy shrine also later.
The art world is growing in appreciation of Rockwell's hyper-realist genius, as evidenced in a small way by the fact that several Frenchmen and women joined the brief tour of his studio we took while we were there.
Rockwell’s persona proved resistant to the overall theme of my journey. I could not work up any evident Catholic tie-in, except perhaps the two Madonna statues in his studio, but then they were gifts he brought home a world tour that joined a Buddha from Siam that he also hung on the studio wall, according to his daughter Abigail in the October 8, 2015 Saturday Evening Post article “Norman Rockwell and Faith,” subtitled THE REAL ROCKWELL.
Rockwell was not a churchgoer, and his aversion to religious observance was shaped by unpleasant experiences during his Episcopalian upbringing. The most overtly religious thing his daughter Abigail could say about him was that he sometimes signed letters, May God bless us all.
His paintings on religious themes are all about tolerance.
Come to think of it, maybe in a stretch Rockwell can be thought of as an American saint of another kind than the ones I was seeking on pilgrimage. Well, not a saint, actually, but an icon, again not literally in the religious sense of the word but in the secular sense, in the same way the Golden Gate bridge is an icon of San Francisco. He stands for a type of hyper-realistic narrative art that was despised for over a century and also for a certain kind of idealism that was sometimes appropriately tempered with a bit of cynicism. As has been observed about his painting Freedom from Want from his Four Freedoms series, in that iconic (there’s that word again) painting of a grandmother and grandfather proudly presenting a perfectly roasted Thanksgiving turkey, no one at the table is paying any attention, and a man painted closest to the far end of the table from the couple is looking out at the viewer as if to say, “Isn’t this all a bit much?”
Filmmakers George Lucas and Stephen Speilberg both admire and collect Rockwell’s work. The George Lucas Family foundation has donated significant sums to the the museum.
Following are some quotes from Lucas.
"I've always been interested in anthropology, and I've always been interested in art that speaks to the time in which it was made," Lucas told Eye Level. "As somebody that records a time, I think [Rockwell was] brilliant at it. Because it's not just recording it, he captures the emotion and more importantly the fantasy, the ideal, of that particular time in American history.
"So you really get a sense of what America was thinking during those years and what their ideals were, and what was in their hearts.”
“With Rockwell, every person is a character, which is what we always aim for in the movies," Lucas told Eye Level.
"We have to make sure that the extras and everybody that's on the screen has a personality, a life. They aren't just nameless, faceless drones that walk through the shot. And a lot of artists don't bother with that."
Working Methods of a Master
Rockwell never painted from imagination. He painted from what he saw. Starting with graphite studies and using oils for his final works, with great skill, Rockwell created his own vivid vision of American life. And he worked for months on each illustration, according to the docent that gave our tour.
(Contrast his painstaking research, use of props, and his knack for finding models whose expressive faces and bodies he could use to good effect, his use of sometimes hundreds of photographs and detailed studies with the working method of Monet, who would line up multiple canvases in a row and complete a painting in less than an hour.)
Rockwell was an astutely perceptive observer who was able to portray the tiny details that establish scene and character with great skill. When I think about his paintings, I remember the phrase God is in the details—a phrase that means to me that without the details nothing would have life. In Rockwell’s paintings, details combine to bring a complex human story to life.
The scenes he painted were perhaps no more literally true to any real people's experience than the contrived (although amusing) situations in Garrison Keillor's fables of the fictional Minnesota town Lake Woebegon, but Rockwell's storytelling gift was even more extraordinary and his work was poetically true. His ability to painstakingly convey details that evoke a scene and create drama are far stronger than Keillor's, as is evident in the painting, Saying Grace.
Saying Grace, a 1951 painting by Norman Rockwell. Painted for the cover of the November 24, 1951 (Thanksgiving) issue of The Saturday Evening Post. (Fair-use allows a low-resolution reproduction of this work to be used an article that discusses the work.)
This illustration illustrates (forgive me) what I am trying to say very well. The details are perfect. Rockwell visited and got photos of Automats, the old restaurants where you would insert a coin and retrieve a plate of food from behind an aluminum framed glass door in a wall of similar glass doors. He purchased authentic used restaurant chairs and tables and used them as props. Telling details include: characteristic cutlery and dishware on the counter near the man with the cigar and the newspaper, partially shown in the left foreground; the woman's carpetbag, umbrella, and wicker bag; the warm bemused expression on the unshaven face of the man in the crumpled raincoat in the upper left in an era when having a two day's growth of beard meant sloppiness and poverty instead of fashionable grundge—those details join with the details in the center, ranging from the subdued but surprised curiosity of the young men's expressions, the cigarette hanging from one of their mouths; the glass and chrome topped condiment dispensers; the lettering on the window, the cafe curtains; the artificial flowers and the feather on the woman's hat, the intensity of her clasped hands, and the reverent angle of the little boy's head and the poignant vulnerability of the nape of his close shaven neck rising out of his starched collar and bent towards his praying grandmother.
High Dive and Stephen Spielberg
Director Steven Spielberg owns the original of this 1947 painting, High Dive.
"For me, that painting represents every motion picture just before I commit to directing it. . . That painting spoke to me the second I saw it. . . I said not only is that going in my collection, but it's going in my office so I can look at it every day of my life." Steven Spielberg, from Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, 2010.
Aerial view of Rockwell’s studio (the red building)—the contents of which were moved to the site from the center of Stockbridge—with the white Norman Rockwell museum behind it and the administrative offices in a donated mansion to the right, set in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts.