Norman Rockwell Essays - World War II, Four Freedoms,

Norman Rockwell Norman Percevel Rockwell was born on Feb. 3, 1894 in New York, New York. As a boy he grew fond of the country, where he moved to a few years after he was born, and stayed away from the city as much as he could, which would later be shown in his works (Buechner, Retrospective, 24). When he was 14, he had to commute to New York City twice a week to attend the Chase School of Fine and Applied Art. After awhile he dropped out of his sophomore year of high school, and became a full time student at The National Academy School (Buechner, Artist, 38). He illustrated his first Saturday Evening Post cover on May 20, 1916, which was his first big break. Norman Rockwell says, If one wants to paint covers for the Post, one must begin by accepting certain limitations. The cover must please a vast number (no matter how: by amusing, edifying, praising; but it must please); it must not require an explanation or caption to be understood; it must have an instantaneous impact (people wont bother to puzzle out a covers meaning) (The Norman Rockwell Album, 29). More people have seen Rockwells work, mostly on the covers on the widely circulated Saturday Evening Post, more than all of Michelangelos, Rembrandts, and Picassos put together, estimated by Life magazine (Walton 7). Rockwell creates his pictures in separate stages. First he makes a loose rough draft of his idea. Second, he gathers costumes, props and models. Rockwells models are usually his friends, because he knows them and likes them (Walton 16). Later on in Rockwells lifetime he would stray away from using real models, he would use photographs to do this step instead. He would take either sketches or pictures and then paint them onto canvas. Next he draws individual parts of the picture. Fourth, he would sketch the whole drawing in great detail. Fifth, he would put color into his sketches, and sixth he would put all the parts together into the final painting (Buechner, Artist, 44). Rockwell used foreground invitation in many of his works. Foreground invitation means that the picture suggests that the viewer is entering the picture and into the scene. Valentine, 3 Rockwells subject matter is average America. For his first 30 years, he painted scenes of the country, childhood embarrassments, discomforts and humiliations (Buechner, Retrospective, 44). He also painted for advertisements during his this period. For example Fisk Bicycle Tires and Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. During the twenties, Rockwell became rich and famous. He became the top cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post which his work appeared almost every month. During the twenties, he also took on more advertising jobs, at twice the fee of a Saturday Evening Post cover (Buechner, Retrospective, 46). During his appearances on the Post during the twenties, he introduced many new subjects, and several characters that would reappear which where bums, sheriffs, musicians and doctors (Buechner, Retrospective, 52). 1935 to 1939 were the years when Rockwells finest art was done (Buechner, Retrospective, 61). Rockwell had stopped using real models and started to turn more toward photographs. This helped him to create a more life like subject because the photograph stays still, a model tends to turn around. He produced sixty-seven Saturday Evening Post covers during the thirties, far less than he did in the twenties but more than any other artist. His most important works of this time was an 8 piece color set for Huckleberry Finn in 1935. Rockwell took this job with enthusiasm because he had a chance to participate in the tradition to illustrate different scenes in classical works, not stories he made up on his own (Buechner, Retrospective, 75). Rockwells art was a big part of the war effort in the forties. A series of paintings called the Four Freedoms explained what the war effort was all about. These pictures (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Fear, Freedom of Worship, and Freedom from Want) were toured in sixteen select cities and were seen by 1,222,000 people and used in selling $132,999,537 worth of war bonds (Buechner, Artist, 161). Rockwell also praised the efforts of women during the war in his paintings. In his Saturday Evening Post cover titled Rosie the Riveter , Rosie (as indicated on her lunch box) sits in a pose of the Valentine, 4 prophet Isaiah (created by Michelangelo in his Sistine chapel painting). This pose portrays the power of women who have filled in