Norman Rockwell: A Life [Hardcover]

Laura Claridge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2001

Norman Rockwell’s tremendously successful, prolific career as a painter and illustrator has rendered him a twentieth-century American icon. However, the very popularity and accessibility of his idealized, nostalgic depictions of middleclass life have caused him to be considered not a serious artist but a “mere illustrator”–a disparagement only reinforced by the hundreds of memorable covers he drew for The Sunday Evening Post.

Symptomatic of critics’ neglect is the fact that Rockwell has never before been the subject of a serious critical biography. Based on private family archives and interviews and publishes to coincide with a major two-year travelling retrospective of his work, this book reveals for the first time the driven workaholic who had three complicated marriages and was a distant father —so different from the loving, all-American-dad image widely held to this day. Critically acclaimed author Laura Claridge also breaks new ground with her reappraisal of Rockwell’s art, arguing that despite his popular sentimental style, his artistry was masterful, complex, and far more manipulative than people realize.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Boy Scout campouts, backyard barbecues, Christmas trees, cheerful barbers: no artist quite converted slice-of-life realism into idealized portraits of the American dream as ably as Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), whose distinguished career art historian Laura Claridge captures just as ably in this welcome biography.

Rockwell, Claridge writes, had ambitions to be considered a great artist, but he abandoned them early on in the struggle to make a living through his abilities as an illustrator. He need not have worried about money quite as much as he did, Claridge suggests, for over his long career he produced more than 4,000 paintings and earned millions of dollars; still, as we learn, Rockwell was a complicated man, beset by all sorts of worries and more expressive on canvas than he ever was in the ordinary situations of life. His patriotic style evolved through his long engagement with the Saturday Evening Post, whose editor, George Horace Lorimer, used "as an instrument of Americanization," a means of establishing a national identity and ideals of "an American community made safe by a shared vision of right and wrong." In this and much else, Rockwell excelled, achieving early and lasting success though never earning much respect from critics and other arbiters of taste--even though, Claridge notes, Rockwell had all the requisite irony, and certainly all the necessary skills.

For the last few years, a new generation of critics has been reconsidering Rockwell's career and viewing his work more favorably. Claridge's gracefully written biography will give them still more reason to see him in a positive light. It will also afford those who already cherish his art new insight into an American master. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Claridge (Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire) is a former English professor at Annapolis now writing books on "British romanticism, Modernism, gender, and psychoanalytic theory," according to the publisher's bio. This unusual mix is ill-suited to approaching America's most beloved Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator. From the start, an oblique, brusque writing style fails to spell things out: "Norman Rockwell was not sadistic. He was, however, expert at creating desire, both in his public and in his private life." Chapters like "Urban Tensions, Pastoral Relief" are rife with two-ton sentences, like "Major life changes seemed consistently in Rockwell's purview during this period, including the professional leadership he took for granted," or "In 1935, Rockwell was offered a prestigious commission that reminded him of the historical antecedents that had motivated his love of illustration." Readers are given much detail about each of Rockwell's homes, without any sense of why this information might be useful or revealing. And readers learn that, in 1978, not only did Rockwell die, but "Margaret Mead, Hubert Humphrey, Golda Meir, and Charlie McCarthy" also bit the dust. With an undiscerning and unhelpful bibliography, this book nevertheless scorns reputable art critics like John Canaday, who is compared to "an arrogant graduate student." Yet the author unaccountably praises Rockwell's typically heavy-handed portrait of tolerance that shows "a Jewish man being shaved by a New England Protestant barber, while a black man and a Roman Catholic priest waited their turn." Rockwell's millions of fans and other readers are better off with previous illustrated coffee-table tomes, while those who need convincing will not be won over by minutiae about the artist's senility and other lackluster details in this misbegotten project. 16 pages b&w and color photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 2nd edition (October 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375504532
• ISBN-13: 978-0375504532
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,317,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, December 15, 2001

By 

Paul Giambarba "http://giam.typepad.com/100_y... (MASHPEE, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Norman Rockwell: A Life (Hardcover)

I've been an illustrator for 40 years. My mentor was a contemporary of Rockwell, also an illustrator and portrait painter who was at the Art Student's League at about the same time as NR. I was all set to like this book after viewing the attractive and articulate author on BookNotes. It turned out to be a chore to read. I'm surprised that Random didn't do more fact checking or editing. It is not so much narrative as it is cut-and-paste word processing. Consider this line for example on page 394: "But at least one son, Jarvis -- who, on finding that he had did not fit particularly well into the Air Force ...." Where are the copy editors when you need them?

Then there are the significant errors, as in the following: [page 209] "First, he recalled briefly the beauty contest he had judged a few years before with Clare Briggs the cartoonist and Nell Brinkley the actress." A simple search on Google will confirm that Nell Brinkley (1886-1944) was also famous as a cartoonist who drew pretty young things for the New York Evening Journal, and not an actress.

On page 300, the author describes a painting of Willie Gillis in church: "In the three pews, shown, only Willie's torso and face are visible; the shoulder of a man in front, and the arm of a man behind, their respective officer and upper enlisted stripes prominent...." This is a curious description coming from someone who taught at the Naval Academy. There is no man shown in front, just the shoulder boards of a US Navy commander. As for the upper enlisted stripes, she should have said hash marks and the distinctive stripes of a First Sergeant (three stripes, two rockers, and a diamond).

The author continually refers to Rockwell's clients as patrons, a term I have never heard used by illustrators or other so-called commercial artists. She also goes to great length to chastise NR for continually accepting more work than he had time to do. This has always been common practice. Some clients bail out after reviewing sketches or comprehensives, or for purely business reasons, which is why kill-fees are used to protect freelancers from spinning their wheels. Anyone who has ever engaged carpenters or other tradesmen knows that they, too, overbook. People who work for themselves have to overbook, if they expect to survive.

The author, as academic, devotes much of the book to psychobabble and pronouncements from on high, making it seem that the Golden Age of Illustration had passed Rockwell by. She refers to the obvious giants such as Pyle, Wyeth, Parrish, and others, who rode in on the waves of four-color process printing as it was first perfected for print production. But consider that Rockwell was the most famous illustrator ever, with an enormous following, and this added years to the Golden Age of Illustration as technical advances continued. It also added many more excellent illustrators, Rockwell's fellow instructors at the Famous Artists School to name a few.

NR's buddies in Arlington, Vermont -- Mead Schaeffer, and John Atherton -- are mentioned often in that period of Rockwell's life, but they are never adequately fleshed out as individuals, Then, we are told that they left Arlington without explaining why.

There are no examples of their work. There are two signatures of photo reproductions reduced to sizes too small to be of much pictorial value. One would really need Arthur Guptill's book on Rockwell, or another compilation of NR's work to understand what the author is talking about as she describes paintings that are either too small to be studied, or do not appear at all.

I wish the text had been cut by a third, elimating all those distant cousins, who add little, or nothing, to the story, and two signatures of full page 4/c process illustrations added, even if it would mean an increase to the cover price.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Norman Rockwell, October 24, 2001

By 

Laura Claridge Oppenheimer (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Norman Rockwell: A Life (Hardcover)

A fantastic biography that rivets you with it's vision of the world of early 20th Century Illustration through WWII and Vietnam. To say that it fills in the gaps and shadows of NR's life is an understatement. Who knew that Rockwell was a high school dropout that married three times--all to school teachers! That his first marriage was "open." I, like probably many, thought NR was politically conservative. WRONG! It turned out, while he liked Ike, he also voted for the Socialist Party in elections--and had a file on him at the FBI!

Very well written, aimed primarily at the artist's life, rather than his art (though that is also touched upon to a great extent) right up through his current "revival." Reads as well as a good novel.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The man behind the myth, October 29, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Norman Rockwell: A Life (Hardcover)

I've grown up with Norman Rockwell images as part of my life, like so many other Americans--but I've never known anything about the man himself. So I picked this up (great discount from Amazon!) and I just have to write in now and say what an amazing story this is! I'm never going to look at a Rockwell illustration the same way again. I don't have time to get into lengthy descriptions except to say this artist had a long and fascinating life that pretty much spanned the 20th century, and this author does a wonderful job describing both his life and times. As a fine arts grad student, I was particularly fascinated to read how Rockwell's incredible skill at drawing was sort of his downfall. He was such a successful illustrator that he never got the chance to be a poor starving artist and find himself. The downside of early success... who knew?

I highly recommend this to anyone interested in art, or not--it's really for anyone who loves a great biography and a great American story.
ACR, RISD student