"I Like To Please People"

On the Satevepost's cover for May 29, one William B. Sommerville of Lawrence, Kans. saw something that rang faint bells in his memory. What he saw was a lordly, rotund lady riveter named Rosie (see cut), ankles crossed, overalled knees relaxed, looking royally satisfied with herself and her bulging cheekful of ham sandwich. Mr. Sommerville took Rosie the Riveter to the public library. Memory's bells became a carillon when he turned up a reproduction of Michelangelo's Isaiah (see cut). Mr. Sommerville sent his find to the Kansas City Star, which made good-humored use of it.

Rosie's creator was probably the best-loved U.S. artist alive--lean, likable Norman Rockwell, painter of the nationally distributed Four Freedoms posters. After the Rosie episode, he got a good deal of personal mail at his home in Arlington, Vt. One of the letters felt that Michelangelo must be about as restful in his grave as a drill in a cavity. The others were pleased. Mr. Rockwell himself, quite untroubled, told questioners that the modeling was of course deliberate, that he thought it would be "fun." He added, "At first I was going to make it entirely like Michelangelo, but his color was not good for a magazine."

Evergreen. In his early teens, 49-year-old Norman Rockwell, son of a New York agent for a Philadelphia cotton-goods firm, studied for a year and a half under Anatomist George Bridgman and the late Thomas Fogarty at Manhattan's Art Students' League. He worked a few months more at the National Academy of Design. That is all the formal art training he ever had--all, for his special abilities and purposes, that he ever needed. At 17 he was doing illustrations for St. Nicholas, Boys' Life, Youth's Companion. In 1916, just as he reached his majority, he also reached the cover of the Satevepost,* which has since kept his bank account and his popular standing green. For the Post he has done, to date, either 222 or 223 covers, he is not quite sure which. During World War I he had a Navy interlude as "third-class painter and varnisher."

Rockwell's popularity is not hard to fathom. His pictures are never self-sufficient as painting; they nearly always tell a story. Moreover, he constantly achieves, with no sacrifice of conscientious sincerity, that compromise between a love of realism and the tendency to idealize which is one of the most deeply grained characteristics of the American people. He has a born eye for the face which combines individualism with typicality, a hairline intuition for the gentling (some would say falsification) which will make it most broadly appealing, a quick and simple love--richly shared with his audience--for home and homeliness in endless friendly details of flesh and costume. He is a master of nostalgias.

Rockwell would probably be incapable of portraying a really evil human being, or even a really complex one--perhaps even a really real one. Though he paints and composes exceedingly well, it is questionable whether any of his work could be seriously described as art. Even the Four Freedoms posters fall short of artistic maturity through their very virtue as posters: they hit hardest at first sight. But, as a loving image of what a great people likes to imagine itself to be, Rockwell's work has dignity, warmth, value.

No Use. The U.S. Government was not smart enough to go to the most popular U.S. artist for propaganda purposes. Rockwell had to go to the Government. One morning not long after Roosevelt and Churchill thought up the subject of a lifetime for him--the Four Freedoms--Rockwell woke with a start at 3, full of ideas. He managed to stay in bed till 5; then he was up and busy with sketches. He called in Neighbor Carl Hess; Hess stood for the shy, brave young workman of Freedom of Speech. A Mrs. Harrington became the devout old woman in Freedom of Worship. A Jim Martin appears in all four posters. All told, the job took seven months.

When Rockwell went to Washington with his sketches, "no one could use them." He promptly "took them back to my beloved Post"--and the Government, thinking it over, has printed, to date, some four million copies. Rockwell has had a good many letters about them. Most of the adverse criticism has pointed out that one particular religion (or another--always that particular critic's) was not strongly enough plugged. Some critics have objected that the sitters are not aristocratic enough; one letter flatly comments on the "common-looking" individuals portrayed. Rockwell himself says: "I put everything I had into them, but they could all stand more work." He wants especially to rework Freedom of Worship and Freedom from Want. The latter is perhaps weakest: Rockwell's acquaintance with want is decidedly impersonal.

"Stick to Your Field." Rockwell has hardly ever tried "straight" painting. Friends used to urge him to, and he did a little during the half year before the '29 crash. The results, he feels, were miserable. "Painting is certainly a higher art than illustrating, but if you are an illustrator, you'd better stick to your field."

Rockwell's tastes in past and present art are entirely what his work would lead one to expect. He venerates Rembrandt and Breughel. He feels the normal awe for Michelangelo, but explains, "Michelangelo is not my star. If I could own an original, I'd rather own a fine Howard Pyle." Among his favorite contemporaries are Thomas Benton, John Steuart Curry, the late Grant Wood. He says "you can learn a tremendous lot from the abstractionists and so forth." But he adds that his own feeling for art is remote from the modernists'--"I like to please people and they don't. I just can't do their kind of work."

*Subject: one kid disconsolately shoving a baby carriage; other kids, jeering, dressed for baseball.

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