Norman Rockwell [1894-1978] American Painter & Illustrator
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• Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine for more than four decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter (although his Rosie was reproduced less than others of the day), Saying Grace (1951), The Problem We All Live With, and the Four Freedoms series. He is also noted for his work for the Boy Scouts of America (BSA); producing covers for their publication Boys' Life, calendars, other illustrations, and for his covers on the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine edited by George Horace Lorimer.

 

 

 

• Body of work: Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing over 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate over 40 books including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts' calendars between 1925 and 1976 (Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America), were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the "Four Seasons" illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for 17 years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "God Bless the Hills", which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's œuvre as an illustrator. In 1969, as a tribute to Rockwell's 75th year birthday, officials of Brown & Bigelow and the Boy Scouts of America asked Rockwell to pose in Beyond the Easel, the calendar illustration that year. Rockwell's work was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime. Many of his works appear overly sweet in modern critics' eyes, especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life— this has led to the often-deprecatory adjective "Rockwellesque." Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a "serious painter" by some contemporary artists, who often regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch. Writer Vladimir Nabokov sneered that Rockwell's brilliant technique was put to "banal" use, and wrote in his book Pnin: "That Dalí is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood". He is called an "illustrator" instead of an artist by some critics, a designation he did not mind, as it was what he called himself. However, in his later years, Rockwell began receiving more attention as a painter when he chose more serious subjects such as the series on racism for Look magazine. One example of this more serious work is The Problem We All Live With, which dealt with the issue of school racial integration. The painting depicts a young African American girl, Ruby Bridges, flanked by white federal marshals, walking to school past a wall defaced by racist graffiti. In 1999, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl said of Rockwell in ArtNews: “Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t. Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2001. Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties sold for $15.4 million at a 2006 Sotheby’s auction. A twelve-city U.S. tour of Rockwell's works took place in 2008.
• Influence: In the film Empire of the Sun, a young boy (played by Christian Bale), is put to bed by his loving parents in a scene also inspired by a Rockwell painting—a reproduction of which is later kept by the young boy during his captivity in a prison camp. (Freedom from Fear, 1943). The 1994 film Forrest Gump includes a shot in a school that re-creates Rockwell's "Girl with Black Eye" with young Forrest in place of the girl. Much of the film drew heavy visual inspiration from Rockwell's art. Film director George Lucas owns Rockwell's original of The Peach Crop, and his colleague Steven Spielberg owns a sketch of Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait. Each of the artworks hangs in the respective filmmakers' workspaces. Rockwell is a major character in an episode of Lucas’ Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, “Passion for Life. In 2005, Target Co. sold Marshall Field's to Federated Department Stores and the Federated discovered a reproduction of Rockwell's The Clock Mender, which depicted the great clocks of the Marshall Field and Company Building on display. Rockwell had donated the painting depicted on the cover of the November 3, 1945 Saturday Evening Post to the store in 1948. On Norman Rockwell's birthday, February 3, 2010, Google featured Rockwell's iconic image of young love "Boy and Girl Gazing at the Moon" which is also known as "Puppy Love" on its home page. The response was so great that day that the Norman Rockwell museum's servers went down under the onslaught."Dreamland," a track from Canadian alternative rock band Our Lady Peace's 2009 album Burn Burn, was inspired by Rockwell's paintings. 

• Major works:
  Scout at Ship's Wheel (first published magazine cover illustration, Boys' Life, September 1913)
  Santa and Scouts in Snow (1913)
  Boy and Baby Carriage (1916; first Saturday Evening Post cover)
  Circus Barker and Strongman (1916)
  Gramps at the Plate (1916)
  Redhead Loves Hatty Perkins (1916)
  People in a Theatre Balcony (1916)
  Tain't You (1917; first Life magazine cover)
  Cousin Reginald Goes to the Country (1917; first Country Gentleman cover)
  Santa and Expense Book (1920)
  Mother Tucking Children into Bed (1921; first wife Irene is the model)
  No Swimming (1921)
  Santa with Elves (1922)
  Doctor and Doll (1929)
  Deadline (1938)
  The Four Freedoms (1943)
  Freedom of Speech (1943)
  Freedom of Worship (1943)
  Freedom from Want (1943)
  Freedom from Fear (1943)
  Rosie the Riveter (1943)[31]
  Going and Coming (1947)
  Bottom of the Sixth (or The Three Umpires; 1949)
  Saying Grace (1951)
  The Young Lady with the Shiner (1953)
  Girl at Mirror (1954)
  Breaking Home Ties (1954)[32]
  The Marriage License (1955)
  The Scoutmaster (1956)[33]
  The Runaway (1958)
  A Family Tree (1959)
  Triple Self-Portrait (1960)
  Golden Rule (1961)
  The Problem We All Live With (1964)
  Southern Justice (Murder in Mississippi) (1965)[34]
  New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967)
  Russian Schoolroom (1967)
  The Rookie
  Spirit of 76 (1976) (stolen in 1978 but recovered in 2001 by the FBI's Robert King Wittman)