Norman Rockwell’s depictions of the typical scenes of American life are reminiscent of carefree times. The baseball game, the barbershop and the camping trip are recurrent themes in the Raleigh gallery. Rockwell’s comical and joyful caricatures depict the small town utopia that the American dream yearns to be. There is one problem, however. Everyone is white.
The North Carolina Museum of Art is now hosting the American Chronicles exhibition featuring the works of Rockwell. The artist is most famous for his work with the now defunct bimonthly magazine The Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell contributed to the publication for 50 years, and countless covers of the magazine line the gallery.
John Coffey, the museum’s Curator of Modern and American Art, is the coordinator of the Rockwell exhibit, which he admits has its limitations.
“If you look at Rockwell’s work over most of his career,” Coffey said, “he is showing a very compelling slice of American life, but it is a very thin slice. Going through the gallery of the 300-plus covers, you’d be very hard pressed to understand the history as a whole of the 20th Century.”
Nevertheless, the final paintings reveal a repressed side that Rockwell could not formerly paint. After leaving the Post in 1963, Rockwell entered a more serious chapter of his life. The last decade of his work represents his less playful and more somber conscience.
As the struggle for civil rights came to full boil, Rockwell gravitated towards publicizing the issues he most frequently neglected. The end of the exhibit mirrors this transformation.
Race issues generally do not play a large role while viewing an art gallery. However, the lack of racial diversity becomes strikingly obvious. Of the plethora of paintings Rockwell made for the Saturday Evening Post, only one depicted a black man, serving a young traveler on a train.
“While Rockwell was working for the Saturday Evening Post,” Coffey said, “he had to follow their editorial guidelines. One of their unwritten guidelines was that black people were not to be on the cover, unless they were portrayed in a subservient position.”
According to Coffey, when Rockwell left the Post, he very quickly turned his attention to current events.
“(Rockwell’s later paintings) are known for a notable lack of humor,” Coffey said.
At the end of the exhibit, the issue of race hits home. Contrasted with the former images of cheerful small-town life, the painting entitled The Problem We All Live With stands out.
“It’s shocking to people, but that is Norman Rockwell,” Coffey commented.
The Problem We All Live With depicts a black kindergarten student, Ruby Bridges Hall, being escorted to school by four U.S. Marshals and addresses the problem of integration in the South.
“That scene is New Orleans, 1960,” said Katherine Mellen-Charron, a history professor and expert on civil rights. “[Ruby Bridges Hall’s] parents had applied for her to go to an all white elementary school and the response from the community and the school administrators was that she needed protection to get in and out of the school.”
According to Mellen-Charron, Rockwell’s painting calls to mind images of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas in 1957, when the mayor had to call in the National Guard after a dispute broke out over the process of integration.
“The difference here is that it was an elementary school,” Mellen-Charron said.
The painting comes as a shock, with the N-word painted in graffiti in the background and with a rotten tomato splattered next to Ruby Bridges Hall, a six-year-old girl in a white dress. The image of the innocent girl amplifies the sense of injustice.
“I was a student in Raleigh during the time of desegregation in the fifties and sixties,” Coffey said. “It was nasty. It might be incomprehensible to a lot of people who’ve grown up quite politely.”
The four burly marshals escorting Bridges Hall in the work suggest that the government protected the civil rights of citizens, but Mellen-Charron argued that it was naïve of Rockwell to portray the government in this light.
“This was usually not the case,” Mellen-Charron said. “They were there to enforce federal law. Many activists found themselves with no protection.”
Rockwell did not stop with integration. In 1964, during the height of the campaign for civil rights, three activists were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi during the project dubbed “Freedom Summer.” Rockwell’s painting helped bring the event to national attention.
“First and foremost, it was a personal reaction,” Coffey said. “His reaction to a terrific injustice and atrocity that he thought he needed to do something about.”
Rockwell’s interpretation of the murders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists appeared in Look magazine’s edition called “Southern Justice.”
This finale provides a much needed aspect of the world that Rockwell painted. Up until the end, the gallery felt uncannily incomplete.
Regardless of Rockwell and civil rights, the exhibit demonstrates the painter’s prolific body of work. Rockwell’s production fills up the gallery to the bursting point.
“I think it is amazing and what is really cool is that he got things started when he was 17,” David Dieffenderfer, a sophomore in English, said. “You can tell that he was a hard worker and I like all the behind the scenes photographs you can see of him here.”
In light of the recent Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the Rockwell exhibit provides various perspectives on the struggle for civil rights. The exhibit features not only a comprehensive selection of Rockwell’s paintings, but also many behind the scenes glimpses into the life of the man behind the work. The North Carolina Museum of Art will feature the Rockwell exhibit until the end of January.
