The Importance of being Illustrators
Writers may have the first place in school curricula for helping out history books in building a good perspective on historical events. However, there are other artists that thoroughly catch l’esprit du temps in which they live and manage to send their record of reality to the next generations and beyond: illustrators.
Images sometimes speak louder than words, and some illustrators have been giving their fifty cents on a couple of world issues better than others. Or, if not better, louder.
Between painters, graphic designers and illustrators, USA had had and has had la crème de la crème to immortalise American life, ideals and history, but one for sure made it through the barrier of time: Norman Rockwell.
Whether you studied the Marshall Plan in your High School history book or were a huge Lana Del Rey fan, you must have stumbled on this man’s very-American character, or rather his ever-famous covers for The Saturday Evening Post.
This very pale, slender figure, caught in a black and white photo curved on his precious canvases is known worldwide for his very elegant and polite representation of the American Society, but what really is interesting about this apparently-quite-normie-white-old-fella-paiter is the disillusion arch reflected in his works, year after year.
Rosie the Riveter
Norman started his career illustrating the covers for The Saturday Evening Post, for which he drew over 300 boards for four decades. The covers featured mainly patriotic, happy and beautiful white children, scenes of everyday life of honest (white) citizens and seldom virtuous non-canonical characters.
Among them, the coolest and the one that convinced me to write about him is Rosie the Riveter, a wonderful depiction of a tomboy-ish muscular woman, having a short lunch break during her shift in the construction site. Despite the fact that after the publication of this cover in 1943, Rockwell had to write a letter of apologies to the model for the illustration since “he drew her way bigger that she actually was”, the drawing shows a glimpse of Norman’s unconventional self, hidden under layers of middle-class respectability.
Rosie the Riveter and her active role on building a New America during WW2 is unfortunately one of the lucky survivors of The Saturday Evening Post censorship: as Norman stated in one of his latest interviews, when asked why he wouldn’t represent black people on his covers, the Post would not allow depictions of black people since it was a “too strong image” for its readers. Despite that, at least Rosie made it to the front page, and we couldn’t be more grateful for her not being obliged into a linen flower dress.
The political drift.
Everything is political, especially since Modernity knocked humanity out of rurality forever. However, Rockwell started as the least political artist of his times. His fame bursted out with his omàge to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Speech, delivered in January 1941 in response to Nazi Germany’s racist policies. Rockwell’s Four Freedom Speech is his declaration of love to America’s ideals of Freedom and Wealth, that didn’t fail to disappoint him after a couple of decades or so.
As much as Rockwell loved F.D.R.'s promises of brightness and equality, he deeply hated the choice of the American Government to invade Vietnam and prior to that, he just could not accept USA’s retrograde behaviour towards Black people. He started revealing his true self and his urge to illustrate true America, with his portrait of Ruby Bridges “The Problem We All Live With”. Ruby Bridges was a six-year-old Black girl here depicted while entering the all-white public school of New Orleans on November 14th of 1960, during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis. Here, Norman Rockwell had just left The Post after having enough of the editor’s insensitivity to political matters and decided to give himself to the cause of desegregation.
Eventually, Norman Seemed to have made it right to his American people, choosing to show not only what was ideal and respectable, but also what was ugly and had to be stopped for the sake of True Freedom. Nevertheless, the “political Rockwell” hasn’t had the fortune of the “respectable Rockwell” and we still have him represented in pop culture as the father of this very white, fake and perfect white America. However, since we prefer the former over the latter, we should all remember his precious lesson: it is never too late to change direction.