OPINION:
Norman Rockwell, born on this day in 1894, reflected the American spirit with canvas and paint as surely as Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt did with words.
His art gave us hope. He celebrated life in a simpler time — backyard ball games, prom dates, boys dreaming they’ll grow up to become firemen, a child goggle-eyed when he discovers a Santa hat and false beard in his father’s dresser.
Middle America took him to heart. The snob-elite disdained him.
He wasn’t an artist but a lowly illustrator, they sneered. His vision of American life — oozing Hallmark sentimentality — never existed, they insisted. They hated him the way they hated filmmaker Frank Capra.
Rockwell had the last laugh. He painted the official portraits of five presidents. His “Four Freedoms,” painted in 1943, raised $132 million in war bond sales when it toured the country on exhibit. In 2013, one of his paintings sold at auction for $46 million.
A former editor at the Saturday Evening Post (where he worked from 1916 to 1963) said a Rockwell cover meant an extra 50,000 to 75,000 in newsstand sales. In 1970, the director of the Brooklyn Museum wrote that Rockwell’s most important work “has been reproduced more often than all of Michelangelo’s, Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s put together.”
When former President Gerald Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he said of Rockwell, “His vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves have become a beloved part of the American tradition.”
I’ve been to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, with its van Goghs and Old Dutch Masters, which I dearly love. And I’ve been to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And I’ll take the latter without a second thought.
They said Rockwell wasn’t serious that his work reflected an America that never was. But it was a reality for many of us. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s when boys caught fireflies in the summer and swam in the creek, and cops were heroes.
Should art disgust and nauseate in the name of realism or inspire and uplift? Are melting clocks and giant soup cans the height of artistic achievement?
Rockwell’s art could be funny, endearing, whimsical, nostalgic and romantic.
Many of his creations are iconic: Rosie the Riveter, Willie Gillis (the G.I. Everyman Post readers followed through Word War II), the young Lincoln as a lanky frontier lawyer (a manacled slave kneeling at his feet — an allusion to the future Great Emancipator), a Boy Scout and a Cub Scout looking into the past to see Washington kneeling to pray in the snow at Valley Forge.
Rockwell usually eschewed politics. But one particularly poignant illustration showed four federal marshals escorting 6-year-old Ruby Bridges to class when New Orleans’ schools were desegregated. She is dressed immaculately in white, her hair in pigtails. On the wall, she’s passing someone who has scrawled a racial epitaph. It expressed the Civil Rights struggle with eloquent simplicity.
Then there’s one called Golden Rule (“Do unto others…”). The entire frame is crowded with men, women and children of different races and religions. One is an elderly Jewish man with a flowing white beard wearing a skull cap and prayer shawl. Mr. Rockwell’s model was the Stockbridge postmaster, who happened to be Catholic.
All of his fans have their favorite Rockwell. Mine is a Saturday Evening Post cover from 1929 that shows a plump middle-aged man asleep in an armchair. On a table next to him is a bottle of cough syrup. A cat wearing a ribbon stands watch at his feet. In the background, the viewer catches a glimpse of his dream of knightly chivalry.
Rockwell was a troubadour with an easel and a palette.
I wonder what he’d think of America 44 years after his death. Could he paint sentimental pictures of children playing internet games, teens using dating apps, the family huddled around an electric fire, watching their 134-channel flat-screen TV or rioters burning down city blocks in the name of racial justice?
Rockwell was born in the horse-and-buggy era and watched America go through two World Wars, the Counterculture Revolution and the Space Age.
It’s too easy to say that Rockwell spoke to another time. His paintings appeal to the unchanging human heart that longs for lemonade in the shade and children tucked into bed at night by mom and dad.
In a time when police are murdered almost every day, and the storm clouds of war again loom on the horizon, we need Rockwell’s vision now more than ever before.
• Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist.
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