PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Was Norman Rockwell A Great Artist?"

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Was Norman Rockwell A Great Artist?

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by:
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future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the
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Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,
the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and
the Smith Richardson Foundation.

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Throughout much of the 20th
Century the paintings of Normal Rockwell brought Americans a warm glow of
comfort and nostalgia. Art critic Dave Hickey called Rockwell the great
narrator of American art. But, more typically the art establishment
dismissed Rockwell’s work as too old fashioned, too narrative, too
realistic, too corny, kitsch with a capital K. But, now a major retrospectiv
eof his work, Norman Rockwell: Pictures For The American People opens on
November 6th at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Later the show will
batter down the walls of museums in six other cities, including the
Guggenheim Museum in New York. A major art magazine headlines a story
asking, is there a Rockwell renaissance. Joining Think Tank to examine the
merits of Norman Rockwell are, Maureen Hart Hennessey, chief curator of the
Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Anne Knutson guest
curator at the High Museum in Atlanta. They are the co-curators of the
national exhibition tour, and coeditors of its companion catalogue. And M.V.
Clark, artist and the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Washington, D.C. The topic before the house, was Norman Rockwell a great
artist,

(Musical break.)

MR. WATTENBERG: Norman Rockwell was born in New York City in 1894. After
discovering a talent for drawing he dreamed of becoming a famous
illustrator. He left high school at age15 to study at the National Academy
of Design and the Art Students League. Rockwell met with early success. His
first Saturday Evening Post cover was published when he was only 23 years
old. He went onto illustrate 322 post covers over the next 47 years. In
1930, after a failed marriage, Rockwell married Mary Barstow, and the couple
had three sons, Jarvis, Thomas, and Peter. In 1942, wanting to do his part
for the war effort Norman Rockwell painted some of his most famous images,
The Four Freedoms. This series was based on President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, which outlined freedom of
speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear as
basic human rights to be guaranteed throughout the world. The paintings were
published in the Post in1943, and later used by the Treasury Department to
sell war bonds, raising over $130 million.

In 1953, Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and after the death
of his second wife, he married a third time in 1961. A few years later he
began illustrating for Look Magazine. It was during these years that he
painted his highly regarded images of the civil rights movement. In 1977,
President Ford presented Norman Rockwell with the Presidential Medal of
Freedom. And in 1978, at the age of 84, Norman Rockwell died at his home in
Stockbridge. Rockwell’s work chronicles a large portion of American life in
the 20th Century, but is he a fine painter, America’s Vermeer, as some have
called him, or just a darn good illustrator. To answer this and other
questions we turn to our expert panel.

Ladies, gentleman, thank you very much for joining us.

Maureen Hennessey, could you tell us something about this exhibition and
this quite remarkable catalogue of the exhibition that is opening in
Atlanta?

MS. HENNESSEY: The catalogue is a companion book to the exhibition, but I
think it goes a little beyond the exhibition, even. What we tried to do is
bring together as many viewpoints as we could, to look at Norman Rockwell
from a variety of perspectives. So there are art historians, popular culture
historians like Neil Harris, cultural critics like Dave Hickey, and even Dr.
Robert Coles, who have written essays for this book.

MR. WATTENBERG: Are all the essays here generally favorable?

MS. HENNESSEY: I think generally favorable. I think Neil Harris has some
particular views about Rockwell’s lack of urban images, and Steve Heller
from the New York Times has written a great piece of about illustration in
the last part of the 20th Century, and how Rockwell was a foil, in a sense.

MR. WATTENBERG: You are the curator of the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.
And you are the curator of the High Museum in Atlanta?

MS. KNUTSON: I’m the guest curator for this show.

MR. WATTENBERG: Guest curator for this show?

MS. KNUTSON: Yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: How did you get into this Rockwell business, and what is
your background that got you there?

MS. KNUTSON: It was two years ago and we had moved to Atlanta from
Pittsburgh, and I’d written the High Museum to see if anything was
available, because I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon and I just finished my
dissertation on American illustrators in the 20th Century. And the High
Museum said, well, this job is available because one of the curators had
left, and are you interested in it, you have the background. And of course,
my first response was, Rockwell, sentimentalism, do I want to do this,
because as an art historian that’s what you’re taught. You know, my
undergraduate, graduate history classes, Rockwell is introduced to be
dismissed. And of course, that’s very typical, because there is no content
behind this kind of thing, you’re not shown his images, his name is up
there, sentimentalism, and just dismissed. But, once I got into the project,
and once I saw the paintings, I was completely transformed, and all those
preconceptions shattered.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay.

Something tells me from my previous research that you are not in complete
accord with what was just said.

MR. CLARK: Not totally, I mean, he’s a great person, and it’s hard not to
like him and everything. But, when you get into trying to assess whether
he’s a great artist, I think you run into some big problems.

MR. WATTENBERG: You have said that he painted an America that never was and
never will be.

MR. CLARK: Yes, I think Rockwell, you know, he was working for a magazine,
he probably had his editors talking to him about what he had to do. He
developed his own style and everything, I mean, Norman Rockwell was Norman
Rockwell. I think that’s why the show will probably be immensely popular
now, is that it’s like Disney World, or Walt Disney, Americans are really
realistic in one way, but in another way Americans like football, and Mickey
Mouse, and Norman Rockwell falls into the wonderland, fairytale type of --

MS. KNUTSON: Let me address that. One thing that I think is so interesting
about Rockwell is that his images take us back through the decades of the
20th Century, giving us glimpses of the daily kind of fantasies, and
anxieties, and longings of America. And as a historian I think that’s also
very valuable. On the other hand, these images also looked at the real
crazes, and the fads that preoccupied Americans, you know, the birth of
speed traps, the evolution of television coming into our homes, and those
things I think are very valuable.

MS. HENNESSEY: I think it’s also important to remember, too, that while
certainly for his story illustration, and I would say also for his
advertising work, which is a lesser known aspect of Rockwell’s career, he
was in many ways very tightly controlled. While the editors of the Post
certainly had apolitical and economic viewpoint that they were trying to put
forward, his cover ideas were really his own vision. And so I think it’s not
fair to say that he was simply drawing or painting what he was told to paint
by the editors of the magazines. And particularly later in his career when
he started working for Look Magazine, he really was allowed to, I think,
show his own personal political viewpoint very strongly, particularly in the
civil rights images. And one of our goals for this exhibition is to kind of
reintroduce --

MR. WATTENBERG: Did he do any civil rights stuff for the Saturday Evening
Post?

MS. HENNESSEY: Not for the Saturday Evening Post.

MR. WATTENBERG: When did he leave the Post?

MS. HENNESSEY: In 1963, and his first image for Look, which appeared in 1964
is one of his best known images, The Problem We All Live With, which shows
the little African American girl being escorted to school by the U.S.
Marshals. But, I think even some of his images from earlier years, I think
it’s very hard for us in the 1990s to look back at this images without kind
of a veil of nostalgia ourselves, and to realize that some of the images,
for example like The Four Freedoms, were extremely political images even at
the time they appeared.

MR. WATTENBERG: One of the phrases I saw in reading through some of this is
that Rockwell is America’s Vermeer. Well, now that’s pretty high cotton. I
mean, anybody, do you buy that?

MS. HENNESSEY: I was going to say, I think that the comparison was being
made in terms of subject matter. One of the thematic sections in the
exhibition is called Celebrating The Commonplace. And I think that’s one of
the things that Rockwell was so expert at, was capturing the moments, and
the moments that people really respond to in a universal way. And I mean, I
think in that way the comparison with some of the genre paintings of those
moments, those subject matters, I’m not sure they were comparing him to
Vermeer in terms of his overall achievement as an artist.

MR. CLARK: Norman’s compositions are probably, maybe because they had to go
a lot of them into the format, either used white, with just the figures in
the front in his earlier work, but they get really jumbled up, and they
don’t -- if you go back to the masters, you know, Bernini, or Titian or
Rembrandt or anyone, there is a real cacophony in the backgrounds of all his
pictures.

MS. KNUTSON: Let me just speak to that for a minute, because that was part
of my preconception, and I want to just tell a story about my transformative
moment, when I went to a collector’s home to see a series of Rockwell. And I
saw Gary Cooper, The Texan, from 1930, and Rockwell went onto the Hollywood
sets ofGary Cooper’s The Texan and was allowed to paint Gary Cooper. And I
stood in front of this painting and I was absolutely transfixed, not
necessarily by the content at first, but by the way he applied paint to the
canvas. It was lushly colored, and layered, and textured, and it was
gorgeous. And seeing a Rockwell reproduction and seeing a Rockwell painting
are completely different experiences. You wanted to touch the surface of the
painting.

MR. WATTENBERG: Even the paintings that were done for covers?

MS. KNUTSON: Yes. I mean, absolutely. And this is part of the point of this
exhibition, to introduce the paintings to people, and to deepen their
understanding of Rockwell and his art, because these are quite different.

MS. HENNESSEY: I think one of the real disservices that’s been done to
Norman Rockwell is that he’s often been dismissed without people actually
looking at the paintings, people dismiss Rockwell based on what they think
they know about his work.

MR. WATTENBERG: From the covers?

MS. HENNESSEY: And only from a small slice of the covers. I mean, I think
it’s remarkable in that his name has become an adjective, you know, you
read, a Norman Rockwell small town, or a scene from a Norman Rockwell
painting, and people think they know what that means. And one of our goals
for this exhibition is to help introduce people to kind of the broader depth
of Rockwell’s work, the subject matter, and to introduce them to the
original paintings.

MR. WATTENBERG: Was the bias against Rockwell triggered as a pro-modernist
statement? In other words, here was a guy who was a realistic painter, at a
time in the ’30s and the ’40s when the whole American art establishment was
moving toward modernism, abstraction, expressionism, and so on and so forth.
Was the sort of castigation of Rockwell, either consciously or
subconsciously, a way to say, that’s all old stuff, look at our stuff?

MR. CLARK: Well, in a funny way it seems like a lot of -- one of the
problems, which stems back to Rockefeller and when he had Diego Rivera paint
out the mural at Rockefeller Plaza, because he wouldn’t take Lenin out of
the painting, I think the establishment went against realism in general, and
they went totally to the abstract.

MS. KNUTSON: In the 1890s illustrators like Rockwell were considered fine
artists. By the 1920s they had been downgraded completely to the status of
commercial artists. And one of the main reasons for this was the rise of
mass magazines. And illustrator painters like Rockwell --

MR. WATTENBERG: And the rise of photography.

MS. KNUTSON: And the rise of photography began, they knew they could make
money for these mass magazines, started to work for the mass magazines, and
the art establishment downgraded them, okay, this is commercial art, you
know, we’re downgrading you to this lower status. And so part of this, part
of the prejudice against Rockwell, I think, is a legacy back to the1920s.

MR. WATTENBERG: Are the Rockwell paintings going to survive the test of
time, and be sort of the record of the mid-American century?

MS. HENNESSEY: I think they will. I mean, I think it’s interesting in a
sense that Rockwell is kind of the last of the celebrity illustrators. At
the beginning of this century people knew illustrators.

MR. WATTENBERG: Do you call him an illustrator or an artist, because I
gather there is a distinction, although I couldn’t tell you what it is.

MS. HENNESSEY: From my perspective illustration is what he did, and I don’t
think you can separate the fact that he was working, in most cases, on
commission, he was working under a deadline, and he talks about that in his
own - his autobiography.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, so was Charles Dickens.

MS. HENNESSEY: Exactly, but he was not alone in that. But, he always
referred to himself as an illustrator. Now, I always make the point too,
people say, well, Rockwell said he was just an illustrator, he never said,
I’m just an illustrator, it was a title he was very proud of, and a
profession that he felt had along and very proud past.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, these paintings are not principally illustrations, they
are stand alone magazine covers. They’re not saying, hey, we’re doing a
story on the Washington Monument, Norman, go do us a picture of the
Washington Monument. They are his own narratives.

MS. HENNESSEY: His own ideas. There’s a great quote in his autobiography,
where he says, you know, I love to do covers and -- I’m paraphrasing, but
covers aren’t technically illustration, I guess I’m an illustrator and so
on. And I think that’s where the covers come in, because they are complete
stories in and of themselves.

MS. KNUTSON: And what’s interesting to me is how many people I’ve talked to
now who say, gee, I love looking at Rockwell’s images, they resonate so much
with my life now. And I’m getting back to your question about time, I think
part of his genius was he was able in many of his images to suppress
signifiers of region and class and social status, so that people could look
at his images and hang their own personal narratives on them. And people
would write from all over the country to the Saturday Evening Post saying,
gee, I love that Rockwell image, I know it probably wasn’t done in my region
of the country, but it reminds me of something in my backyard. And people
say that today.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask something, we did a Think Tank program, I guess
in July, a one on one program with Frederick Hart, the sculptor. And he is
sort of a neo-traditionalist sculptor, did the Vietnam -- the three
soldiers, and did the west front of the National Cathedral. And we got --
and he made a case not only about his art, but that the American artistic
establishment has to pull itself out of the hole it had dug for itself. And
we got more mail in on that program in a bad television time than on any
program we ever did, almost all of it saying, right on. There is a lust out
there, in my judgment, for people saying, we took a wrong turn in sculpture,
art, music, fiction, you name it. And I just wonder, is this alleged
Rockwell renaissance, if it’s so, is this part of that turn?

MS. HENNESSEY: Well, I think one of the interesting things about this whole
idea of a Rockwell renaissance is the renaissance is among what audience. I
mean, the fact is that the Norman Rockwell Museum we have about 200,000
visitors a year, which living in a -- we’re in a rural area of western New
England. You know, the whole county population is 135,000. We get many, many
more letters and people coming to us, and we know that there is a great deal
of popularity with Norman Rockwell, and has been.

MR. WATTENBERG: And always was.

MS. HENNESSEY: So the renaissance is really among, I think, the art critics
perhaps, and the art historians. And we’ve seen some of that starting to
change over the last 10 years.

MR. WATTENBERG: But, they are not without influence, the chattering class.
Do you find this idea of a turn away from modernism across the arts a
plausible notion?

MS. HENNESSEY: Yes, but I’m wondering if it doesn’t have to do with larger
issues, because I also have people coming to me and saying, you know, in an
age where we’re faced with violence in schools, and lots of political fraud,
I think we all need a little dose of Rockwell. So I think it can’t be
separated from what’s going on in the larger arena.

MR. CLARK: I think you also have to look at the fact that the government,
and Jesse Helms leading the pack, really bashed the art world down. And I
think they put the hurt on a lot of the museums. I mean, you can look what’s
going on with Giuliani, the mayor of New York City, and the Brooklyn fiasco.

MR. WATTENBERG: Do you think that the government has a duty to subsidize art
that is insulting to many voters?

MR. CLARK: No, but the thing is that now I think the museums, the trustees,
everybody can be happier with like a motorcycle show like the Guggenheim
did, or a Rockwell show, which his going to bring a lot of people in,
because one of the big problems is modernism has -- a lot of the viewers of
art have voted with their feet. They don’t come to the museums, because the
art got so way out, it has insulted a lot of people. It’s supposed to be
thought provoking, or the feelings of people, there’s a socio-political
thing that’s happened now that is quite unique. And it could be - you know,
maybe they should just show people like Frederick Hart, it’s like beautiful
art that doesn’t really --

MS. KNUTSON: But, I think Rockwell show is a wonderful opportunity for High
and the other venues who are taking it on for the museums to introduce
themselves to this broad audience that Rockwell attracts, and encourage them
to come back again, if they’re experience was friendly and fun, to look at
the contemporary and modern artists that aren’t as easy to grasp.

MR. CLARK: Everybody should look at it, I mean, the more people -- if you
can -- you know, you never know, a person can -- if they never go into the
museum they may never do art, they may never support art. But, if they go
into the museum and they walk around and see the Greek stuff, or whatever is
around, they may get turned on, anything --

MS. HENNESSEY: But, I’d also make the point that because of the view in the
art world, and in art historical circles that for museums like the High this
was a real leap of faith, to agree to co-organize this exhibition with us
five years ago. This exhibition was not warmly received by every museum that
we spoke to around the country. And even within museums that are taking it
there was some feeling on the part of staff members, and on the part of
trustees that somehow this was, I think, pandering to a certain segment that
they were trying to bring into the museum.

MS. KNUTSON: Some of them are coming back and saying, we’d like the show
now. So there’s this transformation.

MS. HENNESSEY: Yes, there is a transformation happening, but I don’t think
it was all solely people saying, well, this will bring people in at the
gate, so let’s take this show.

MR. WATTENBERG: Just speaking as a world class artistic philistine, let me
ask the question, what is wrong with realism? I mean, the great classic
painters were basically realists. And the rap in the last 50, 75 years, I
guess, going back to Picasso, Mondrian, whatever, is that that’s bad stuff.
Why is it bad stuff?

MR. CLARK: Why realism in general?

MR. WATTENBERG: Yes?

MR. CLARK: Well, like I said about Rockefeller and the Museum of Modern Art
really broke bad on the whole realist movement, because a lot of the people,
what they were saying was too thought provoking.

MR. WATTENBERG: The realists were too thought provoking?

MR. CLARK: Yes, I mean, look, Adolf Hitler was an artist, and couldn’t get
his art career going so he moved into politics. I think there’s a big fear,
there’s big messages in art.

MS. HENNESSEY: What about the superrealists, Clark, like Estes? There’s a
movement in contemporary art where you see super realism.

MR. CLARK: Well, that art market in a sense has failed. He may be the only
one that gets the really big prices. I think a lot of it -- the stock market
has done such a weird thing to culture, and the people are like what’s it
worth, what’s his success, this thing is blah, blah, blah, what’s it worth,
it really has gone over what the real intent of art, they’ve turned
everything into kind of a circus, in a sense, that if it’s not making money
it can’t be good. It’s like Frank Sinatra is great because everybody likes
it and people buy his records.

MR. WATTENBERG: That is a topic, and a good one, for another program. Let me
just go around the room, one, two, three, a quick answer. Was Norman
Rockwell a great artist?

MS. HENNESSEY: I think that he was a very important painter, and that many
of his paintings are great paintings.

MS. KNUTSON: I think that his paintings are skilled and complex, and
multivalent, and I think he was a wonderful artist.

MR. CLARK: He could be the great art of the 20th Century. I think we’ll have
to wait until the year 3000 to find out. But, it’s a toss up. This may be
his 15 minutes.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right. Thank you, Maureen Hart Hennessey, M.V. Clark,
Anne Knutson.

And thank you. We encourage feedback from our viewers via email. It’s very
important to us. I read all of it, the staff reads all of it, and we answer
many of the messages personally. Also, we will occasionally be reading them
on the air.

For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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Funding for Think Tank is provided by:
At Pfizer, we’re spending $5 billion dollars, looking for the cures of the
future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the
only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work.
Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,
the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and
the Smith Richardson Foundation.

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