I was extremely reluctant to start this project at first. I was finding any and all excuses to not present on this seemingly boring painter. I even got into a huge debate with my friend back home about whether or not I should present someone completely different. She was pro-Rockwell, and after about an hour and half of debate and fun sidetracks, I gave up and starting cracking down on his life.
It was actually fascinating. I never realized the contention and blatant racism of the Saturday Evening Post during this time period. It really makes you think about the sheer power that media had back then. Nowadays I feel we're even more so plagued by media, but it's almost subjective media at this point; you choose what you want to look at and consume (save for the pesky ads on the side that drill into your subconscious and you start thinking about the little caesars guy at 2 am and wonder why he has pizza impaled on a pike when he should canonically have like 40 stab wounds and why does he say "pizza pizza" like that?? ... )
Suffice it to say there was an inescapable, hegemonic kind of media back then, and cover images were paramount to getting viewership. It was the hook, after all. And for a predominately white, middle class target demographic, having people of color in any way, shape, or form that wasn't subservient was jarring and too liberal, in the eyes of the Post's editors. At first glance, without this knowledge of the Post's ideological underpinnings, one would assume Rockwell to be at fault. After all, look at all of his works (except for the extremely liberal and revolutionary work "The Problem We All Live With"): almost every painting displays white, middle class nostalgia. In fact he created the simulation of that nostalgia, which was in my opinion wholly perpetuated by the expectations of the Post. Yet when one digs deeper into these works, there are things that are...off. Compositional decisions that underscore that felicity with ambivalence and anxiety. It's especially noticeable in his two Homecoming paintings.
Blaming the Post in its entirety though seems like a bit of a stretch, a very nice, captivating narrative of the struggling artist shut down by the man. And though I believe that did happen to a large degree, I also think Rockwell definitely had some biases of his own. Outright racist? No, but certainly passive on the whole ordeal. The anxieties and ambivalences he displays in his works I think are largely for himself. It's a very slight communication of unrest, nothing to stir the souls of readers. I also believe his environment was predominately white and middle class, so it was inevitable that he'd work in his comfort zone too. I think the zeitgeist spawned "The Problem We All Live With" more so than latent desires to speak out. Certainly he had much more freedom to do so after the Post, of course, and that 1963 work, in comparison, certainly shows departure from hegemonic ideologies and "keeping the problem quiet". Yet...I don't know, it seems right out of a biopic to venerate the man in his entirety through subtle clues. Like most things in life, it's a middle ground. The answer is never really all that extreme because there's so many factors that go into an outcome, and the patterns I picked up on were simply one out of a myriad of ways to read it. I overall think he created that perfect simulation, but the intent of it is rather murky.
It was actually fascinating. I never realized the contention and blatant racism of the Saturday Evening Post during this time period. It really makes you think about the sheer power that media had back then. Nowadays I feel we're even more so plagued by media, but it's almost subjective media at this point; you choose what you want to look at and consume (save for the pesky ads on the side that drill into your subconscious and you start thinking about the little caesars guy at 2 am and wonder why he has pizza impaled on a pike when he should canonically have like 40 stab wounds and why does he say "pizza pizza" like that?? ... )
Suffice it to say there was an inescapable, hegemonic kind of media back then, and cover images were paramount to getting viewership. It was the hook, after all. And for a predominately white, middle class target demographic, having people of color in any way, shape, or form that wasn't subservient was jarring and too liberal, in the eyes of the Post's editors. At first glance, without this knowledge of the Post's ideological underpinnings, one would assume Rockwell to be at fault. After all, look at all of his works (except for the extremely liberal and revolutionary work "The Problem We All Live With"): almost every painting displays white, middle class nostalgia. In fact he created the simulation of that nostalgia, which was in my opinion wholly perpetuated by the expectations of the Post. Yet when one digs deeper into these works, there are things that are...off. Compositional decisions that underscore that felicity with ambivalence and anxiety. It's especially noticeable in his two Homecoming paintings.
Blaming the Post in its entirety though seems like a bit of a stretch, a very nice, captivating narrative of the struggling artist shut down by the man. And though I believe that did happen to a large degree, I also think Rockwell definitely had some biases of his own. Outright racist? No, but certainly passive on the whole ordeal. The anxieties and ambivalences he displays in his works I think are largely for himself. It's a very slight communication of unrest, nothing to stir the souls of readers. I also believe his environment was predominately white and middle class, so it was inevitable that he'd work in his comfort zone too. I think the zeitgeist spawned "The Problem We All Live With" more so than latent desires to speak out. Certainly he had much more freedom to do so after the Post, of course, and that 1963 work, in comparison, certainly shows departure from hegemonic ideologies and "keeping the problem quiet". Yet...I don't know, it seems right out of a biopic to venerate the man in his entirety through subtle clues. Like most things in life, it's a middle ground. The answer is never really all that extreme because there's so many factors that go into an outcome, and the patterns I picked up on were simply one out of a myriad of ways to read it. I overall think he created that perfect simulation, but the intent of it is rather murky.
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