American Idol

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in early spring, a small group gathers in the main gallery of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in front of Norman Rockwell’s well-known painting New Kids in the Neighborhood, a 1967 work illustrating an African-American family moving to a new home in the integrated suburb of Park Forest, Illinois. Wray Gunn Jr., a gray-haired museum guide nattily attired in a navy blazer and purple slacks, introduces himself as one of the models for the painting, and the resemblance to his thirteen-year-old self on the left side of the picture is striking. Gunn regales the group with details of the experience: his younger cousin Tracey posed as his sister, and the most challenging part of their day was interacting with the very large and fractious white cat the little girl holds in her arms. Gunn clearly relishes recounting the story of his interaction with Rockwell, and the museum visitors, in turn, are delighted to hear it.

Such response is “the same thing that galvanized me and captured my imagination when I came to the museum several decades ago,” says museum director and CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt. “What I recognized early on was the connection Rockwell’s art had with the public, and how important it was to make sure that was not only preserved but widely shared and presented.”

Norman Rockwell, who made Stockbridge his home from 1953 until his death in 1978, was, of course, a visual storyteller, an exceptionally prolific illustrator, and quite a celebrity. Despite his renown, he was an accessible neighbor, very much at ease riding his bicycle around Stockbridge.

“Norman Rockwell Museum [tells] the story of a community and the great affection of the public for the art of Norman Rockwell,” says Norton Moffatt, who first worked at the museum in 1977 as a college student, and has been its director since 1986. The museum celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. Norton Moffatt’s voice is soft but she speaks with authority and passion about her work. “Our museum has become an organization that has brought Norman Rockwell’s art to this nation in a way that wasn’t possible before our museum existed,” she says. “You couldn’t see his work, you couldn’t study it or teach from it; there was no way to find it. No one knew all that Rockwell had done, no one knew where all the art was, and it certainly wasn’t being collected by other museums or collectors.”

Two significant programs now underway will make Rockwell’s contributions more widely available: ProjectNORMAN and the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies. The former involves the digitizing of thousands of items from the Rockwell archives; the latter is the first research institute in the country to focus on illustration art. The Rockwell Center will begin its work in earnest this summer, and when ProjectNORMAN becomes available on the Internet in November, “It will explode the accessibility of the museum,” Norton Moffatt states.

On the lower level of the museum, past the three hundred and twenty-three Saturday Evening Post covers painted by Norman Rockwell hanging in matching white frames, behind closed doors, and away from the eyes of visitors, museum staff are methodically photographing and scanning the thousands of items in the Norman Rockwell archives—items that are now arranged in rows of gray boxes neatly lining tiers of gray metal shelves and will soon be accessible online. For now, ProjectNORMAN, a ten-year effort that began in 2003 to digitize Rockwell’s artworks, photographs, and letters, is very much a behind-the-scenes operation, but in November, scholars, curators, and Rockwell fans everywhere will have access to materials that previously required a trip to Stockbridge.

“I think it’s critical to preserve the visual culture of our last one hundred and fifty years,” says Norton Moffatt, speaking not only of Rockwell’s work but of the wider field of illustration art, “and the fact is that this material hasn’t been widely collected in museums.… We’ve lost a tremendous amount of work that just got thrown out over the years,” she emphasizes. “Preserving this original material before it is lost is absolutely essential.”

In 1943, when Rockwell was still living and working in Arlington, Vermont, his studio burned down, destroying its contents. “After that,” explains deputy director and chief curator Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, who has worked at the museum for fourteen years, “he was more careful about keeping all the components of his career—checkbooks, fan mail, business correspondence, letters from ad agencies and corporations and individuals—materials that reflect on the broader climate in the nation, the economy, and certainly in publishing, and that provide meaningful background. There are very important letters from famous individuals, including presidents and celebrities and public figures, who commented on what Rockwell was doing.”

Norton Moffatt authored the definitive catalog of Rockwell’s art, completed in 1986, which accounted for four thousand works; some additional pieces have been found since. ProjectNORMAN includes references to all of these. “We also have his body of reference photography—eighteen thousand negatives have been digitized,” Plunkett says. “We are making them available for a broad audience.” A total of forty thousand objects will have been processed when the project goes online in November.

Once ProjectNORMAN is online, a search for a specific Rockwell painting, for example, will also produce links to all other material in the archive related to that particular image: any prints or tear sheets, reference photos and resource materials, correspondence, sketches, studies, earlier versions of the painting, and even props or costumes worn by models.

This spring, the Norman Rockwell Museum hosted two scholars, both curators from the Smithsonian American Art Museum working on a show of Rockwell’s work from private collections. “What they were able to do, which they would not have been able to do even a few months ago,” explains Plunkett, “is access Rockwell’s photographic reference for the particular paintings that will be in the exhibition, how Rockwell acquired his props, prompted his models, and put the whole scene together—one of the things ProjectNORMAN has made possible.”

Corry Kanzenberg, curator of archival collections, is focused on digitizing what she describes as more than nine hundred cubic feet of materials. “We estimate it’s in the hundreds of thousands [of objects],” she says of the original artwork, sketches, studies, printed versions of paintings, correspondence, and an array of ephemera, as well as personal items once belonging to Rockwell.

Kanzenberg, a dark-haired woman in her late twenties wearing chic black eyeglasses, projects a calm and methodical demeanor while processing the thousands of objects under her care. A bank of flat file drawers contains Saturday Evening Post covers, tear sheets of advertisements for which Rockwell supplied artwork, oversize movie posters once displayed at theaters, ads for Rockwell’s Hallmark Christmas cards, and ads with Rockwell’s endorsement of art supplies, all stored smoothly between sheets of thick, acid-free paper. Wearing white cotton gloves to protect the paper, Kanzenberg opens a file drawer and lifts a poster for the 1943 film, The Song of Bernadette. The colors in Rockwell’s portrait of actress Jennifer Jones remain vibrant after sixty-six years.
Kanzenberg explains that the museum has been collecting what she calls “first use” examples of Rockwell’s illustrations. She opens a shallow storage box to reveal a 1950s Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box with a boy wearing a red and yellow beanie on the front, obviously Rockwell’s work—the museum owns the original painting.

Next, Kanzenberg opens a large carton containing baby bonnets and booties that Norman Rockwell wore as an infant, carefully folded into tissue paper and labeled. The bonnets are handmade, embellished with tiny pintucks and crocheted edges, and in perfect condition, considering they date back to 1894.

Another box holds five pairs of eyeglasses Rockwell donated to the collection toward the end of his life, including the vertical bifocals he had custom-made by an eye doctor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Rockwell wore them to paint, when he would glance side to side from the model to his canvas. There are two Ripley’s Believe It or Not!-style cartoons portraying the unusual glasses. The eyeglasses are wrapped carefully in tissue; the newspaper cartoon clippings are in mylar sleeves and tucked into the box as well, as is a note reading, Since I no longer seem to need these, I’d like the Museum to have them. Sincerely, Norman Rockwell.

The museum’s archivist, Jessika Drmacich, is working on correspondence from Rockwell’s fans, which is stored in precisely organized boxes and bins, everything as neat as a pin. Manila folders inside the boxes hold letters, sketches, newspaper clippings, cards and more: Rockwell’s fans sent him all kinds of things.

Drmacich, a tall blonde, also wearing  white cotton gloves, extracts a telegram that Rockwell received from Jerry Lewis, thanking him for a painting. She explains that she will write a “finding aid” for the Jerry Lewis telegram, a brief description of the correspondence and its location in the archives. The most important pieces of mail will be digitized.

Also included is a letter from the singer Bing Crosby, who wanted an original painting, and a letter from Walt Disney, humorously signed “Walt Who” and dated 1943, as well as a letter from President Eisenhower. Drmacich is organizing the hundreds of letters by month and by year.
Rob Doane, historian and assistant registrar, has been digitizing materials for the last year and a half, using special collections management software that functions like a database. When he started, most of the computerized records of items in the museum’s collection were text only. Doane, with his rangy height overshadowing his computer workstation, has placed images with the text, and now most are complete. As the goal is for users to be able to search for a painting by title, subject, and theme, Doane is painstakingly inserting search terms into the database, using a list provided by the Library of Congress.

“Rockwell, being the quintessential and the most widely known American illustrator,” explains Plunkett, “brings attention to the field of illustration art that is on the one hand broadly circulated and widely seen, yet on the other hand, under-acknowledged and under-studied. That is the difference this museum can make, bringing attention to the power of the mass-published image to influence and inspire and reflect what society is and has been.”

A Day in the Life: Norman Rockwell’s Stockbridge Studio is the first exhibition to make use of the material from the archives now being analyzed as part of ProjectNORMAN. Rockwell’s studio, the one he called his “best studio ever,” was left in trust to the museum and moved from Rockwell’s former home near Main Street to its current site in 1986. Everything in the studio was kept just as it was when Rockwell passed away in 1978, but this past winter, the curatorial staff reinstalled all the objects to replicate the space as it was in 1960, when Rockwell was working on Golden Rule.

Using photographs from 1960, the staff was able to determine the correct placement of the thousands of objects in the studio, including Rockwell’s art supplies: hundreds of paintbrushes, hundreds of tubes of paint, Wolff’s carbon pencils, kneaded erasers, pocketknives, and a box of vine charcoal. Images that showed bookshelves were enlarged so that the volumes of art books in his library could be placed exactly as Rockwell organized them. Even the green couch where a photographer caught Rockwell napping has been included, as are the phone numbers that he scrawled on the wall next to a very dirty beige telephone.

ProjectNORMAN falls under the umbrella of the brand-new Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies (RCAVS), which will bring scholarly attention to American illustrators and their work, including an illustration art network connecting museums, libraries, colleges, and other organizations with information and collections of illustration art; a research program offering Rockwell Scholars support and access to other aspects of illustration art; and the building of a significant collection of original illustration art at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

Joyce K. Schiller, formerly curator of American art at the Delaware Art Museum, is the inaugural curator of the Rockwell Center. “I think illustration is a field yet to be discovered by a lot of people,” she says. Schiller sees the Rockwell Center as an opportunity for collectors and collections interested in illustration art to connect in a structured, focused way, which will bring the genre more into the mainstream. Some of the first projects underway include “creating an online listing of illustration art around the country,” Schiller states, “and thinking about how to entice young scholars into working in the field of illustration art.”

Creating a community of scholars sharing information and ideas is necessary, and that it happens in one place is important, says Schiller, and “where better than the Norman Rockwell Museum?”
“It is always interesting to see illustration work exhibited in a museum setting,” says Marc Rosenthal, an illustrator based in Lenox, Massachusetts, and a member of the museum’s illustrators advisory board. “Work that was designed to be seen with text, to play off a headline, must now be seen on its own. Different, formal qualities become important. Can it have a resonance that transcends its original intent?” Rosenthal believes that the Norman Rockwell Museum is unique in showcasing historical as well as contemporary illustration. “I applaud their efforts to make the museum so much more than a monument to just one artist,” he says. “It is truly becoming a valuable resource for both illustrators and the public.”

The work of that one artist—Rockwell—will, of course, be on view this summer, when the museum welcomes its five millionth visitor. American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell, a major retrospective, will open, appropriately, on July 4, and be on view through September 7. The show spans more than forty years, and includes well-known Rockwell canvases such as No Swimming, painted in 1921, and the powerful The Problem We All Live With, created in 1964. Rockwell was in every way a storyteller, and his paintings in this exhibit tell the story of much of the twentieth century.

American Chronicles has been on a nationwide tour; back in February, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, reported that the show had garnered record-breaking daily attendance. “We had the same experience when the exhibition went to the Guggenheim. It was the top-drawing art exhibition they ever had. The same at the High Museum of Art,” says Norton Moffatt. “That just attests to the power of this material.”

Illustration art is created to communicate a message, Norton Moffatt explains. “It’s designed to engage a viewer in an experiential moment, whether it’s an idea, a thought, an emotion, or a historical moment. Norman Rockwell’s art is so emblematic and exemplary of that experience, and I don’t know of any other artist where people respond to his work so deeply and so personally,” Norton Moffatt adds. “I think the experience that people have here is one that goes to the very heart of what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of a family, what it means to engage in a community—of people, of citizens, of neighbors, of friends.”

Back in the main gallery, Gunn reminisces about his grandfather, David Gunn, who lived in Stockbridge and was a friend of Norman Rockwell. Because of that connection, not only are Gunn and his cousin pictured in New Kids, but, all told, seven of his family members appear in five prominent paintings. “I met Peter [Norman Rockwell’s son] for the first time three years ago,” Gunn recalls. “He said to me, ‘Do you know how important you are in being a part of that painting?’ meaning that it was an important visual image in the civil rights movement. I’ve finally come to realize just who this man was. I’ll be thirteen years old forever.” (JUNE 09)

Lesley Ann Beck is managing editor of  BBQ: Berkshire Business Quarterly.

THE GOODS  

Norman Rockwell Museum
9 Glendale Rd./Route 183
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.4100
www.nrm.org

In The Beginning...

Comfortably seated at a small table in her sunny office in Linwood, the 1859 Berkshire “cottage” on the Norman Rockwell Museum campus, director and CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt—her blonde hair in a shoulder-length bob and her tailored skirt and jacket making her appear professional, chic, and artistic all at once—recounts the first days of the museum, which started as a community effort to save a venerable building on Stockbridge’s Main Street.

In 1967, a small group of Stockbridge residents, led by Norma Ogden, Patricia Deely, and Rosamond Sherwood, determined to save the Old Corner House from being torn down. “They started a fundraising campaign to buy the building and they engaged the broader involvement of the community to help them,” says Norton Moffatt. “A number of people came to the fore, including Jane Fitzpatrick and Norman and Molly Rockwell.” When the doors opened in 1969, the building, operating as the Old Corner House Stockbridge Historical Society, was a sort of community center. Then, adds Norton Moffatt, “Norman Rockwell said, ‘Well, if you’d like to hang my paintings in one of the rooms, I’d be happy to lend them.’”

From that moment on, Norman Rockwell’s pictures became the draw and, through word-of-mouth, people came to see the collection. In 1973, Rockwell established the Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, placing approximately one hundred and twenty works in the care of the fledgling museum; in 1976, Rockwell added his studio and its contents to the trust. In 1975 the board made its first acquisition, The Problem We All Live With, purchased from the Bernard Danenberg Galleries in New York.

The Old Corner House wasn’t founded to be the Norman Rockwell Museum, Norton Moffatt notes, but with thousands of people visiting every year, the board had to respond. “I started with the museum in the summer of 1977 as a college summer job, and by then the museum had committed to research and scholarship on Rockwell’s work,” Norton Moffatt says. Rockwell died in 1978, and by 1980 a site-search committee was formed to find more appropriate quarters for a museum.
Norton Moffatt was appointed the museum’s first curator in 1981; in 1986 she was named director; and in 1993, the museum moved to its new building on the thirty-six-acre site overlooking the Housatonic River. The white clapboard building, flanked by kingly old pines and a row of sheltering hemlocks, was designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern, who created an elegant fusion of New England practicality and classic architectural details.

In the last forty years, Rockwell’s artwork has been studied, collected, and exhibited; works by more than four hundred and fifty illustrators have been shown, exhibitions curated by museum staff have been seen in museums across the country, and millions of visitors have been welcomed. In November, the Norman Rockwell Museum became the first museum awarded the National Humanities Medal in recognition for significant scholarship in the humanities.
—LAB