REAL ART: NORMAN ROCKWELL

This article from the Houston Chronicle caught my eye yesterday:

A brush with history

A print of Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With hangs in Lucille Bridges' Houston apartment. But until last week, the Katrina evacuee had never seen the original painting.

It showed the scariest day of her life: Nov. 14, 1960, the day she sent her oldest daughter, Ruby, to the all-white William Frantz Public School. U.S. marshals escorted Bridges and her 6-year-old into the New Orleans school, past an angry white mob.

The story made national news, but it's Rockwell's image — the cover of Look magazine in 1964 — that lingers in the American subconscious. In his painting, skinny first-grader Ruby Bridges wears a spotless white dress, white socks and white sneakers. Schoolbooks in hand, she walks purposefully between four burly marshals, oblivious to racist graffiti behind her. A splattered tomato drips down the same wall, its juice as red as blood.

For Lucille Bridges, now 72, the moment seemed long ago and far away until she arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A longtime resident of New Orleans, she relocated to Houston after the hurricane. Most days, she thinks more about her dog or her grandkids than she does about integration.

Click here for the rest.

My father worked for Southwestern Bell in Houston for 35 or so years before he retired back in the mid 90s. I've always had a great deal of respect for how he started out at the very bottom of the corporate ladder, as an electrician's apprentice, and worked his way into middle management without the advantage of a college degree. Today, I'm especially proud of the fact that my family, despite its late bourgeois trappings, is, and always has been, working class. My people do things. But that's ultimately neither here nor there. The point is that along with my old man's telephone work goes a bit of a family legend:

The day my father was hired by the phone company, 1957 or '58 I think, one of the last questions he asked his new boss was something to the effect of "how should I dress?" As the legend goes, his supervisor pointed to a Norman Rockwell print hanging in his office and told my dad to dress like that. Dad, still in his teens and wanting to make a good impression, went shopping and managed to recreate the look almost perfectly, a Rockwell painting come-to-life. Years later when I was a kid in the 70s my mom bought the same print, nicely framed, for my dad's birthday--it still hangs in my parents living room today. It's really a great picture, very life-like, but also theatrical in that, like virtually all of Rockwell's work, it strongly suggests some kind of story. Pretty quickly, I started to recognize the artist's trademark style, and intensely grooved to his work whenever I encountered it, which was quite a bit back in those days.

By the time I was a college student in the late 80s, however, I was dismissing the great illustrator's work as fluff. Indeed, his heartwarming images of small town America, obviously intended to reinforce pro-establishment attitudes, struck me as being much more a part of the problem than the solution. This is not to say that I ever stopped liking Rockwell's work. It's just that I had developed a taste for more intellectually challenging stuff. That's college for you.

Anyway, flash forward to a couple of years ago. Louisiana Public Broadcasting was running a Norman Rockwell documentary. That's where I learned of his more politically oriented work, or, more specifically, the painting mentioned in the excerpt above. It blew me away. It was as though Charles Schulz had decided to incorporate Malcolm X as one of his Peanuts characters. Well, okay, not quite like that, but I tend to think in terms of legends and mythology whenever I can, so I hope you get the idea. It was shocking, in a good way. The warm fuzzy man of my youth had some teeth after all. Kickass.

So then, yesterday, I just happened to click on this Chronicle story about Ruby Bridges' mother finally getting to see the painting in person. "Interesting," I thought as I read the first bit of the article, but then it got more interesting: this event immortalized in Rockwell's art took place just down I-10 in the city I love, New Orleans, which makes my connection to the story just a bit more personal. Even more personalizing for me is that the painting is now in Houston, my hometown, and Lucille Bridges is only there because she had to relocate after Katrina. To top it all off, Ruby Bridges, herself, came to Baton Rouge, where I now live and go to school, after the hurricane, and, according to Wikipedia, still lives here.

Pretty weird. There was just no way that I could go without posting the story.

But here's my bottom line. While writing this I've realized that my earlier dismissal of Rockwell was unfair, and I don't mean simply because late in his career he started to incorporate political themes in his pictures. The Americana portrayed by Rockwell wasn't propaganda. I think it would be idiotic to believe that the artist wasn't aware of America's shortcomings. After all, he lived through the Great Depression, one of the worst times in this country's history, and was born in an era when he was bound to have met people who had fought in the Civil War. Consequently, I've decided that, rather than being pro-establishment, Rockwell was trying to show the country what it ought to be, trying to provide inspiration and vision, pointing us in the right direction. That's worth something. That's Real Art.





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