Art Chowder November | December, Issue 24 | Page 33

Northwest Museum
of Arts and Culture
Spokane, Washington
October 5, 2019-January 12, 2020
“The story of my life is,
really, the story of my
pictures and how I made
them. Because, in one way
or another, everything I have
ever seen or done has gone
into my pictures.” 1
W
hen we speak of “Norman Rockwell’s America” what exactly do we mean?
Many illustrators have depicted American scenes but what is it about Rockwell’s
vignettes of American life that made his the most widely known, beloved and so iconic?
With twenty-nine original paintings and drawings, the official government posters of the
Four Freedoms, and all 322 Saturday Evening Post covers, the current exhibition at the
Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (MAC) offers visitors the opportunity to reflect
on these questions and others.
The career of artist-illustrator Norman Rockwell spanned six decades and compassed
both World Wars, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights era, technological
developments from the horse and buggy to men walking on the moon, and the drastic
societal-cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Rockwell remained a traditionalist, a pictorial
storyteller and representational-realist during the advance of modernism. Leading
intellectuals were declaring his kind of work obsolete. Abstract art, epitomized by
Jackson Pollock’s drip canvases, was art’s true future they said.
“Commonplace never
becomes tiresome. It is we
who become tired when
we cease to be curious and
appreciative … we find
that it is not a new scene
which is needed, but a new
viewpoint.”
- Norman Rockwell
“You have to put Rockwell
down, down below the rank
of a minor artist. He chose
not to be serious.”
- Clement Greenberg, art critic and leading
promoter of Abstract Expressionism
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)
“The Doughboy and His Admirers”
1919, oil on canvas
24 1/2” x 21 1/2”, signed lower left
The Saturday Evening Post February 22, 1919 cover
The artist’s mastery of drawing, tonal
value, color, and detail are strikingly
evident, down to the softened fuzzy
edge on the red sweater.
The following image credit applies to all pictures
© 2019 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Photos courtesy American Illustrators
Gallery,
New York, NY 2019
November
| December
33