Norman Rockwell, arguably America’s favorite illustrator, had a unique ability to find and visualize stories that endure in our memories. His largely sunny vision of America, as conveyed in his paintings, reflected the world he lived in †and influenced American culture from the 1920s through the 1970s. He said his aim was “showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.”
Great storytellers, like Rockwell, often convey inspiration to other narrators. Nevertheless, it may come as a revelation to many that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, tough-minded, adventurous Hollywood filmmakers, are major collectors of the art of “Mr Middle America.” Sensing a kindred spirit, they use Rockwell images to shape movie themes and frame film shots.
The enormously successful film directors, who both grew up studying Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers, were captivated by their narratives of the foibles, fantasies, courage and patriotism of ordinary Americans. Their passion for Rockwell is palpable and contagious.
Lucas (b 1944) and Spielberg (b 1946) recognized that Rockwell (1894‱978) “was a master at telling a story in one frame,” says Lucas. Moreover, notes Lucas, who was raised in Modesto, Calif., Rockwell’s pictures first introduced him to art. He loves them for what they say about the times in which they were created. Lucas recalls nostalgically that “all the things that are in Rockwell paintings, I grew up doing&uch as burning leaves on Saturday morning.”
Spielberg, who grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz., recalls looking forward to seeing the Saturday Evening Post not to read articles, but to explore stories told on the covers. He calls Rockwell the “great American story teller,” who told tales “in a flash; he did this with a single image. He invites us to explore the image&nd to question” what it means.
The connections between Rockwell and Hollywood highlight “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through January 2. The exhibition showcases more than 50 major Rockwell paintings and drawings, screens filmed interviews with the directors and quotes them extensively in the excellent catalog.
The exhibition is organized by the museum’s senior curator Virginia M. Mecklenburg, who says that “Lucas, Spielberg and Rockwell perpetuate ideas about love of country, personal honor and the value of family in their work. With humor and pathos, they have transformed everyday experiences into stories revealing the aspirations and values that have sustained Americans through good times and bad.”
After studying anthropology and art history in community college and attending Southern California’s film school, Lucas won an internship at Warner Brothers, where Francis Ford Coppola helped him learn scriptwriting for movies with broad appeal. Lucas says Rockwell had a big influence on his feeling “comfortable” when he started making movies “because I understood how you develop character and tell stories using the visual medium.”
Spielberg began even earlier, catching the movie bug when he made a film for a Boy Scout merit badge. Rockwell’s long-term involvement with the Scouts added to the movie man’s affinity for his art. Another film Spielberg made on the side while attending California State University, Long Beach, got him a job directing episodes for television series. Lucas and Spielberg became friends early in their Hollywood careers when they joined forces to make Raiders of the Lost Ark , Lucas as writer and Spielberg as director.
It “had all the ingredients,” observes Mecklenburg, “of a Rockwell picture and more” †as the college professor hero away from the classroom becomes a daring adventurer challenging forces of evil to reclaim an object that symbolized the best of human aspirations. Indiana Jones appealed to the audience’s fantasy side and encouraged the idea that anyone could emulate him, if necessary. “He’s everyman. He’s us,” says Lucas, suggesting links to Rockwell’s ordinary people who are capable of implausible heroism.
Looking back, the film men remember seeing wars, social change, the Civil Rights movement and technological progress through Rockwell’s lens. Lucas associates with a Rockwell image of a boy reading a King Arthur story and visualizing a scene in which his armored hero rides by. He admires “Boy Reading Adventure Story,” because of “the vast distance between the boy’s real life and the farthest reaches of his imagination.”
Spielberg’s first Rockwell acquisition, “And Daniel Boone Comes to Life on the Underwood Portable,” a 1923 ad, shows a youngster at a typewriter with a vision of Daniel Boone overhead. The film director says the picture reminds him of his own work writing movies, “waiting for that little thought bubble to appear over my head [with] an image that could get my fingers dancing on the keys.”
Lucas recalls that he sought to capture a Rockwellian sense of nostalgia in his first hit film, American Graffiti . The “particular kind of social culture” it reflected was “a direct descendant of Rockwell,” he observes.
Spielberg was impressed with the concept of family ties conveyed by Rockwell’s “Freedom from Fear” picture, part of a 1943 series based on President Franklin Roosevelt’s description of why America was fighting in World War II. In it, a couple looks down on their sleeping children; the mother arranges the covers while the father holds a newspaper with headlines screaming “Bombing” and “Horror.” Spielberg restaged the scene at the start of his film Empire of the Sun , when the parents tuck in their son just before the war in the Far East separates them; thereafter, as the son moves among internment camps, he carries a “Freedom from Fear” image torn from a magazine to help sustain him.
Lucas takes special pride in his collection’s rough oil sketch of Rockwell’s painting for the cover of a 1964 McCall’s, “Little Girl Looking Downstairs at a Christmas Party.” A youngster has crept from her bed to observe the crowd at her parents’ holiday party. The film director notes that “over-the-shoulder point of views put the viewer in the frame, which is just what we do in movies.”
Likewise, Rockwell was a kind of movie director, using cinematic devices to tell his stories on magazine covers. The “one frame [cover illustration] tells everything you need to know,” says Lucas. “We [movie directors] strive to get images that convey visually a lot of information. Rockwell was a master at&⁴elling a story in one frame.”
For example, a very early Post cover, “Pardon Me,” 1918, shows a teenaged boy who has just stepped on his partner’s foot at a dance, while others snicker in the background. The whole story is told in one picture that could have happened years before or later. “It is a scene of innocent humor †something we’ve all done when we were younger and we still do when we’re grown,” observes Spielberg.
Rockwell painted “Shadow Artist” from the point of view of awed children watching an adult use his fingers to create the image of an animal head by light of an oil lamp. “Just by the tilt of the heads, just by the body language, you can tell they are completely fascinated by what they’re watching,” notes Lucas, “and you can see the pride&n the part of the shadow maker.”
The perceptiveness of Rockwell’s images emanated from his keen observation of those around him and his meticulous attention to accuracy in painting his pictures. He loved what he did, working ten to 12 hours, six days a week and sometimes Sundays. Wherever he lived, he used neighbors, friends, people with appropriate faces as models, and had a genius for coaxing just the right expression out of them.
A gifted humorist with a great sense of the dramatic, Rockwell was like a movie director: he fixed the pose and expression of each figure, sited each prop and lighted his scenes for desired effects. Eventually, he used photographs extensively. His early magazine covers, Mecklenburg points out, “resemble frames from silent movies” †pratfalls, sight gags and easily recognizable stereotypes. But over time, his images took on deeper emotional content and increasingly elaborate narratives.
During the war years, in addition to the celebrated “Four Freedoms” series, Rockwell turned out paintings of the trials and tribulations of men in the military, civilians contributing to the war effort, like “Rosie the Riveter,” the joyful returns of GIs to their families and the challenges of adjusting to civilian life.
In postwar America, free of wartime restrictions, Rockwell showed Americans taking to the road †and having flat tires or getting sunburned at the beach †and otherwise pursuing the good times. He had time to do a clever “Triple Self-Portrait,” a charcoal and pencil version of which Spielberg owns, as well as an oil version of “The Connoisseur,” showing a well-dressed man contemplating a Jackson Pollock Abstract Expressionist work.
It was a good time to be an artist who said he always painted the world as he would like it to be. Similarly, Lucas recalls that he was taught in film school to make movies about the “way things should be.” “Rockwell’s images may be dated,” he adds, but “the content is not.”
Spielberg believes his creative vision was inspired in part by Rockwell’s view of “an America of such pride and self-worth. My vision is very similar to his.”
Both film directors, while citing ways in which Rockwell portrayed the American dream, also note that in the 1960s he began to acknowledge how society was changing. Spielberg, who owns several 1960s Rockwells, says it must have been “heartbreaking” for the illustrator “to watch the American dream start to evaporate” as the Civil Rights struggle, feminist movement and Vietnam stirred controversy and conflict.
After leaving the Post in 1963, Rockwell hooked up with Look to produce storytelling vignettes of black children moving into white neighborhoods or being escorted to court-ordered integrated school by federal marshals; a posthumous oil painting of John F. Kennedy being nominated for president at the 1960 Democratic National Convention (owned by Spielberg) and numerous ads for a variety of products. Each retained an unmistakable Rockwellian touch.
Rockwell, who lived a quiet life in small-town New England (Arlington, Vt., and Stockbridge, Mass.,), had several brushes with Hollywood, doing publicity portraits of stars in the 1930s and 1940s, and again in 1965, in his early 70s, when he traveled there to paint likenesses of stars of a remake of Stagecoach .
When the producer saw Rockwell doing card tricks off the set, he asked him to play the nonspeaking role of Busted Flush, an old cowboy gambler. A born performer, who had cast characters, costumed models, arranged props and lighted sets for years, the great illustrator agreed, thus adding “silent film actor” to his resume.
Throughout his prolific career Rockwell reminded us of the importance of love of family and country, of personal honor and tolerance, of ordinary people becoming heroes †standards that have sustained America through thick and thin. It is reassuring that Lucas and Spielberg, in their prime as moviemakers, continue to look at Rockwell’s America through his art, and will presumably keep on conveying his optimistic view of the nation on the silver screen.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is at Eighth and F Streets, NW. For information, www.americanart.si.edu or 202-633-7970.
