If the Fates Allow

 

I'll write about the bounced commies and Luke Short's new western some other time. For now I want you to focus solely on Norman Rockwell's illustration. The people pictured seem realistically rendered, don't they? That's partly due to Rockwell's skill as a painter, especially his almost photographic attention to detail, and partly because, well, they're real people. The woman doing the hugging is Rockwell's second wife Mary. The young man she's embracing and who's back is turned to us is Jarvis Rockwell, her and Norman's oldest son. On the far-left edge of the painting, in glasses, is youngest son Peter. And the exuberant lad in the plaid shirt right behind Mary is middle son Thomas. The man with the pipe who seems to be looking on at the scene taking place with amused curiosity is none other than the family patriarch, Norman himself. The family that models together stays together.

Yet according to Deborah Solomon's 2013 biography, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, this was anything but a model family. Rockwell was insecure about just about everything but his chosen profession. And even then, he was more secure doing commercial art--which a Saturday Evening Post cover basically is--than the type of art found in galleries and museums, which in his case turned out to be the same thing but the latter not realized until very late in his life. This insecurity led to him maintaining a certain aloof distance from family and friends, and family at least paid a price for this aloofness, most notably wife Mary, who developed a serious drinking problem that repeatedly landed her in and out of the hospital. Eventually the whole family ended up in therapy. The illustration itself doesn't truly reflect on the Rockwell family's 1948 Christmas. Norman spent the holiday in Los Angeles--as a kind of personal getaway, while the rest of the family stayed behind in Vermont.

Does that make the above illustration a lie? Not necessarily. It could have taken place during a different Christmas. Or just as likely, Rockwell may have witnessed somebody else's family reunion, and just replaced that other person's family members with his own, achieving in art what his own insecurities prohibited him from doing in life. Whatever the reason or whatever happened, it's worth remembering that imperfect people and imperfect families, both of which there are a great deal many, have to find ways to make it through a holiday season in which the perfected art of happiness is practically a moral mandate. Enjoy the eggnog and brush strokes.

Enough of that. I don't want to ruin your holiday. So I'll turn my attention to the woman pictured above, who is also in the Rockwell illustration. Turns out she was an...

Christmas at Home (1946)

...artist herself.

That's right, it's Grandma Moses. Born in 1860, the farmer's widow didn't take up painting until age seventy-six. Completely self-taught (thus a "primitive" artist) she produced pictures of what she termed "old-timey" New England. One of these pictures ended up hung in a rural drug store, where a big city art collector out for a drive in the country saw it. Soon after a collection of her works hung in the gallery of an Austrian refugee who had run afoul of the Nazis for the twin crimes of being Jewish and advocating modern art. That was waaay different from anything that happened to Grandma Moses in old-timey New Hampshire, but no matter, soon she went from folk art to what might be called fine art, though the style remained basically the same, only now exhibited in different venues. As she became more well-known, Grandma Moses became a pop culture figure as well, thanks in large part to Hallmark cards, which reproduced her paintings on a series of popular greeting cards.

Norman Rockwell, himself a pop culture figure with a line of Hallmark greeting cards, helps Grandma Moses cut a cake celebrating her 88th birthday. The whole thing was a PR stunt dreamed up by a Hallmark exec. It certainly made sense to pair the two, who had just met. Though their artistic styles, and perhaps their artistic sensibilities, differed, what both of them offered the greeting card consumer was that much sought-after commodity: warmth. And wouldn't you know it that a genuine warmth did develop between the two? They became friends. Not best friends. The age difference (he was thirty-four years her junior) and Rockwell's own aforementioned aloofness, got in the way of that, but for a while Grandma Moses was part of his social circle, and as with anyone part of his social (and familial) circle, it eventually got her on The Saturday Evening Post. Not that Grandma Moses needed his help getting on the...

 

 

...cover of a magazine.

 

Take it away, Judy: