Because the Thanksgiving holiday has been on everyone’s minds, whether to complain about retail stores making their people work on the holiday or just to remind folks to be grateful for all they have and to share with others, I found myself looking at Norman Rockwell’s iconic Thanksgiving painting. You’ve all seen it — the HUGE turkey and the family gathered. He’s generally known for his mirroring of the American scene. I should say rather his homey and often humorous reflections on white bread America. But I knew that he had not limited himself to just that so I began looking for other ways Rockwell depicted America. The results were surprising and worth sharing.
Because of this blog, I at first thought of the painting called, “The Problem We All Live With,” of Ruby Bridges. The results of my search, although not exhaustive, opened up a window into Rockwell’s view of American life. As Jane Allen Petrick puts it, it was “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Other People in Norman Rockwell’s America.
According to Petrick, Rockwell’s close association with the Saturday Evening Post required him in the Post’s directive, if African Americans were depicted at all, to show them in menial or subservient positions. This compelled Rockwell to affect a strategy of subversion if he wanted to continue painting their covers. As a result, for the duration of his time with the Post, African Americans’ presence in his art was limited but not absent and not demeaning. For example the painting below. In it the porter is shown, yes, he’s a porter, but he is clearly bemused by the kid traveling alone and trying to act like an adult.
After leaving the Post, in part because of these restrictions, he began working for Life Magazine and the painting below shows that his vision of America was much more expansive than may have been previously thought. The times were changing and Rockwell intended that his art would reflect that.
Another of Rockwell’s long associations as a commercial artist was with the Boy Scouts. Here he was able to be more expansive and took that opportunity. Paintings for Boy’s Life, the scouting magazine, and their yearly calendar were much more inclusive, as you can see from the two paintings below.
Much more can be found in Petrick’s book Hidden in Plain Sight:The Other People in Norman Rockwell’s America.
For now, I’ll leave this post with one last image that, I think, offers a clearer insight into Rockwell’s vision of America than we usually think of and one we may have previously missed.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING AND HANUKKAH TO ALL
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