| Rockwell, Norman (1894-1978)
American illustrator and painter, born in New York. He left school at 16 to study at the Art Students League and by the time he was 18 was a fulltime professional illustrator. In 1916 he had a cover accepted by the Saturday Evening Post, the biggest-selling weekly publication in the USA (its circulation was then about 3 million), and hundreds of others followed for this magazine until it ceased publication in 1969. He also worked for many other publications. Rockwell's subjects were drawn from everyday American life and his style was anecdotal, sentimental, and lovingly detailed; he described his pictorial territory as 'this best possible-world, Santa-down-the-chimney, lovely-kids-adoring-their-kindly-grandpa sort of thing'. Such work brought him immense popularity, making him a household name in the USA, indeed something of a national institution; in 1943 an exhibition of his work raised more than $100 million for war bonds, and his books, such as Norman Rockwell, Rlustrator (1946) and Norman Rockwell, Artist and Illustrator (1970), were bestsellers (the latter is said to have sold over 50,000 copies in six weeks at $60 a copy). For most of his career critics dismissed his work as corny, but late in life he began to receive serious attention as a painter. In his later years, too, he sometimes turned to more weighty subjects, producing a series on racism for Look magazine, for example. From 1953 until his death he lived at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where a large museum of his work opened in 1993. Part of the funding for it came from Steven Spielberg, America's most commercially successful film-Maker, who feels an affinity with the American painter who has appealed most to a mass audience. |
