If you say grace tomorrow, you could do worse than
thanking God for the four freedoms enumerated by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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Freedom from Want, 1943, Norman Rockwell
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I had a painting teacher who hated Norman Rockwell. She
was in agreement with the art establishment of her time, which derided him as
‘just an illustrator.’ They also rebelled against his view of America, but that
wasn’t what she said. “He has no sense of perspective,” she told me. “He just
layers objects to give the illusion of depth.”
For some of his cover art that was true. Consider The
Runaway (below), painted for the September 20, 1958 cover of the Saturday Evening Post. It’s
just three figures square to the picture plane, surrounded by the horizontal
lines and miscellany of the soda shop counter. If that was the only Rockwell
painting you ever saw, you could be forgiven for thinking as she did.
Compare that with Shiner (also below), from the
May 23, 1953 cover of the same magazine. The little girl is again square to the
picture plane, but there is a second focal point at the top right. They’re tied
together by the linoleum. We’re seeing the subject from a kid-height viewpoint.
Rockwell understood perspective quite well, thank you.
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The Runaway, 1958, Norman Rockwell
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Freedom from Want was painted during World War II as
part of Norman Rockwell’s Four
Freedoms series. The series was meant to illustrate a
passage from President Franklin Roosevelt’s State of the Union address
of January 6, 1941, when Nazi Germany occupied most of Western Europe. The
paintings were so idiosyncratically American, however, that they instead have
come to represent American values. Freedom from Want is now
irrevocably entwined with the American holiday season, which kicks off
tomorrow.
The foil for the whole painting is the white-on-white table,
surrounded by a wreath of faces. If you’ve ever wondered about Rockwell as a
painter, study that table. He’s as brilliant with the whites as
Joaquín Sorolla, albeit in a much more American way.
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Shiner, 1953, Norman Rockwell
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The table is significantly foreshortened and the
centerpiece—a fruit bowl—is at the very bottom of the picture. That and the
truncated faces at the bottom make you wonder how much longer the table
actually is.
This clever cropping make you think you’re looking at a
snapshot of someone’s dinner. Of course, you’re not. He painted the figures
from life, using his friends and neighbors as models. About the turkey,
Rockwell said, “Our cook cooked it, I painted it and we ate it. That was one of
the few times I've ever eaten the model.”
Note that there’s almost no other food on the table. Such is
the magic of his realism that Rockwell makes you believe it’s an overloaded
table. In fact, that was the criticism of it at the time, that it depicted
indulgence while Europe was starving.
Of course, Thanksgiving is a meal of excess. (I myself plan
to make seven pies today.) But if you say grace tomorrow—and I hope you do—you
could do worse than thanking God for the four freedoms enumerated by President
Roosevelt all those years ago:
Freedom of Speech
Freedom from Want
Freedom from Fear
Freedom of Worship
This was originally published in 2017. Have a very
blessed holiday!