Norman Rockwell
Biography of Graphic Artist Noted for Nostalgic
Posters and Illustrations.
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Norman Rockwell
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Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)Contents • Biography |
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A full-time professional illustrator by the age of 18, the American painter and graphic artist Norman Rockwell produced some of the most famous pictorial images of everyday American life in the 20th century. He became a household name in American art, creating illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post magazine for over 40 years. His best known pictures include the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter and Saying Grace. Rockwell produced over 4,000 original artworks in his life, many of which have become valuable collector items. He also produced two best-selling books: Norman Rockwell, Illustrator (1946), and Norman Rockwell Artist and Illustrator (1970). Rather like his earlier counterpart Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Rockwell has often been dismissed as corny by his critics (many art books still carry no reference to his aesthetics or creative accomplishments), but his down to earth realism portrayed an important, if nostalgic, view of American life. In 2006, one of his paintings sold for $15.4 million at Sotheby's New York. |
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First Illustrations Financial Success Rockwellian Style of Illustration No American illustrator had a greater impact on early to mid-twentieth-century popular culture, or a more profound influence on many generations of American illustrators, than Norman Rockwell. He was the spiritual descendent of the great illustrator storytellers: Winslow Homer, Howard Pyle, and N.C.Wyeth. As such, he was a marker in the evolutionary progression of American illustration. His career took hold in the early 1920s, around the same time that photography completely transformed graphic journalism, making reportorial illustration virtually obsolete. But Rockwell steadfastly refused to let illustration become trivial. Using the camera as a reference tool, a means of freezing gesture and expression for future reference, he executed paintings of American life that gave full-colour, bolder dimension to his subjects than many of the half-tones commonly reproduced in national magazines. While most illustrators, especially those working for The Saturday Evening Post, stayed the course, producing reams of quixotic scenes and sight gags, Rockwell maintained a standard of excellence that far transcended a profession more concerned with servicing the ephemeral needs of the masses than making profound art. Rockwell had a gift for reflecting his times through iconic representations of everyday life, and these became the unofficial/official art of his nation. From the 1920s through the 1950s, his style was the standard for commercial artists, who used Realism to illustrate books, magazines, and advertisements. Paradoxically, though, Rockwell's art was both a model for excellence and a blueprint for cliché. Rockwell ultimately modelled his characters and applied his craft from an intuitive sense of what would appeal to an audience of average Americans, who were not interested in European modern art but enjoyed pictures that represented their own heroic yet commonplace lives. Owing to his success, many commercial illustrators copied Rockwell's manner - which itself owed a debt to the works of Michelangelo and the other Renaissance paintings - but most failed to capture Rockwell's genius for presenting the ordinary through extraordinary composition and gesture. Rockwell liberated American illustration from its reliance on archetypes; he introduced real-life protagonists instead of cardboard heroes. Yet he was the leader of a style that in lesser hands (and there were many) was an abyss of romanticism and sentimentality. His own portraits just bordered on caricature art to heighten drama and capture a moment. But, by comparison, most other illustrators of his day, including those working for The Saturday Evening Post, were flat. Rockwell ran one step ahead of cliché, while his acolytes lagged a furlong behind. They copied what they thought Norman Rockwell should be, not what he was. Rockwell's most popular and populist series of paintings, the "Four Freedoms", were just brushstrokes away from mere propaganda for traditional American values. However, by skillfully balancing honest sentiment and uncompromised enthusiasm, and by remaining faithful to natural expression and body language, the idealism expressed in the representation of these virtues was elevated to a manifesto of faith, as well a document of art. Owing to Rockwell's dominance, he was a lightning rod for change. Rockwell drew respectful fire from the young rebels, while his many imitators earned their contempt. "Rockwell" was a catch-all term for artists rooted in tried-and-true representational mannerisms, which dominated most American commercial art from roughly the mid-1950s until the mid-1950s. Rockwell's influence on the genre was widespread, and those who slavishly followed his surface style were published in all the magazines and illustration yearbooks. The verisimilitude of the kind that Rockwell accomplished so well, and that imitators attempted to capture, was anathema to a new breed of "expressive" artists who sought to liberate editorial (and possibly advertising) illustration from the stranglehold of academic verities and to reinvest it with expression.
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• For more biographies of American
artists, see: Famous Painters.
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