Hi everyone, I'm Virginia Mecklenburg, 
curator of the exhibition,
'Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg'.
It's on view here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
We are very pleased to be able to do this show,
because it offers a new take on Rockwell.
It turns out, that Rockwell was incredibly tuned in 
to what was going on in pop culture
and especially to movies in the film industry.
It also turns out, that two of the great
 film makers of our own time
see Rockwell as a kindred spirit
and they have become major collectors of his work.
This podcast will highlight some
 of the themes the exhibition explores
and you will hear George Lucas
 and Steven Spielberg talk about
what Rockwell and his pictures mean to them
I'll fill in with commentary, and
 a few quotes from the artist.
Telling Stories has been organized by 
the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Booz Allen Hamilton has provided 
very generous support
as the corporate sponsor of the exhibition.
Who is Norman Rockwell?
You probably recognize Rockwell's name
even if you don't know anything else about him.
But for 50 years we was probably 
the best loved artist in the country.
He started out when he was just a kid.
His first real job was doing covers
 for the Boy Scout magazine
Boys Life in 1912.
Four years later, he was doing
 covers for the Saturday evening post.
One of the most popular magazines
 in the country, at the time.
What is it about Rockwell's pictures that appeals to us
now more than 30 years after he died?
Well, he makes us laugh,
and he makes us think,
and he shows us who we are and what we care about.
Each picture tells a story.
So we think of him as a kind of a visual narrator.
But he thought of himself as a movie director.
He auditioned models who became his cast,
He picked out all the costumes,
and even acted out their roles,
so the models would understand 
exactly what he had in mind.
Here is George Lucas.
The key to Rockwell is that he is a great storyteller
and he used cinematic devices
to tell his stories
and he cast the painting.
The characters in there are characters.
They are designed, they are written, 
and they are put in there very specifically.
It is not a random group of people.
Each one - their face, their expressions, 
their thinking, everything about them
has been cast.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg 
were kids in the 1950s.
Both of them grew up looking at pictures 
on the cover of the Saturday evening post.
Steven Spielberg remembers it well.
Whenever my dad would bring home
 a Saturday evening post,
Norman Rockwell was the cover art
often.
And so often, in fact, that
I just looked forward not to even to opening up
the post to see what was inside.
I was mainly interested in seeing
what story this painter was telling on the cover.
Well, I grew up in the hayday of
the Post magazine.
So, you know, we subscribed every
week or so we would get a picture
and I would enjoy it.
I became a fan of Illustrators, I liked drawing, I liked art.
I especially liked magazine illustration.
I came from a small town in central California.
I gew up in the Norman Rockwell world 
of burning leaves on a Saturday morning.
All the things that are in Rockwell 
paintings, I grew up doing
and it was a part of my life.
So there is a very strong nostalgic 
pull for me with Rockwell.
I think growing up on Rockwell
 is probably a very big influence
on why I felt so comfortable when I 
got into the movie business.
because I understood how you developed 
character and tell stories
using the visual median.
I started collecting at a very young age
and in the beginning the only thing
 I could really collect was comic art.
Because that was all I could afford.
It was very, very inexpensive.
And then, after I did American Graffiti
I had enough money to actually buy real paintings
or at least real drawings. I think the first
Rockwell I ever collected was a calendar of winter
and then I think summer came along, and I got that one.
You know, a matching of the same year.
Then as time went on,
and I acquired more resources 
then I was able to buy
bigger and bigger works.
The very first painting I collected
was a painting called, 'Daniel Boone Comes to Life'.
It was wonderful because it kind of
was, you know, speaking to me
on a whole other level.
When I would sit down in front of my type writter
to try to write a story
for a movie
I would often just sit in front of the type writter
you know, waiting for that little thought bubble
 to appear over my head.
Producing an image that would get my fingers
stanching on the keys
and that was very evocative for me
that he was imagining Daniel Boone before he
actually began to write about him.
There's a lot of portrayals
in Rockwell's paintings
of kids entertaining themselves,
having a good fantasy life, having fun,
and playful.
That's what I was trying to capture in Star Wars.
The boy imagining, that really is a
painting about imagination.
The boy reading and you see behind
 him the knights and all the things.
It's a story celebrating literature,
the magic that happens when you read a story,
and the story comes to life for you.
Which again is something very simple, 
but it's something that is very profound
that we all went through.
Really no matter what culture we are from.
I have several paintings that revolve
around entertaining and entertaining young people.
Which is what I've ended up doing
in spite of myself.
But, the shadow maker, where you
 are doing shadow puppets on a wall
and the awe that the kids have.
Again just seeing it from their 
point of view over their shoulder.
You know, he is very good at expressing ideas
through other people.
Just by the tilt of the heads,
just by their body language,
you can tell that they are completely 
fascinated by what they are watching.
You can see kind of the pride of
this working on the part of the shadow maker.
Also I have the toy maker.
Which is where a kid is watching 
this thing being created in front of him.
The idea that storytelling and 
the use of awakening children's imagination
obviously means a lot to me, so that's why
a lot of those Rockwell paintings depict that.
At the core of Americans is a wish
to have this innocent, naïve life.
A lot of young people have that innocent, naïve life.
So, even though the images may be dated
the content is not.
We are now, in this day and age, actually 
going through a visual metamorphosis
with digital technology and the way kids grow up.
That may date all of this stuff rather dramatically.
Because kids, their experiences are so much 
different then the kids of the '20s and '30s.
In terms of the way they play
and so much of what 
Norman Rockwell does is play.
But, the awe, the simple awe of watching a toy be made,
or playing baseball,
and somebody arguing
those things are eternal.
In 1930, Rockwell had a chance to see
 the movie industry first hand.
An old friend invited him to come to Los Angeles
to cheer him up after a recent divorce.
Rockwell was thrilled.
He said he had been thinking of doing
 a Saturday evening Post cover.
In his words - of a raw boned glamorous cowboy
dressed in chaps, boots, and spurs
having his lips painted by a hard bitten 
little makeup man.
Well, his friend took him to see the publicity director
at Paramount Pictures
who said, "how about Gary Cooper?"
Cooper's latest movie, The Virginian, had
been a big hit.
He was about to begin shooting a
 western called, "The Texan".
Take a look at the props.
Sure enough, Cooper has on boots,
chaps, and a quill vest
and is sitting on a fancy saddle with his
 Stetson on the ground beside him.
He is the quintessential macho cowboy.
When I first saw, The Texan, I
was amazed at how colorful and almost 
how feminine Gary Cooper's makeup was
with the rouge and the lipstick.
The makeup artist was actually preparing
 him for a black and white role
not for a color motion picture.
In black and white, in order to 
accentuate the cheek bones
that's how people were made up in
 those days for black and white photography.
That's how they were made up all through the silent era.
It was absolutely authentic to the period
in which it was painted.
It was great to see Gary Cooper sitting there
a complete thorough professional
routinely having his makeup put on
before he would get on his horse
and do something utterly heroic.
In Hollywood, Rockwell saw 
potential stories everywhere.
Movie Starlet & Reporters is a 
classic image of a young actress on tour.
Stardom is supposed to be exciting and glamorous
but she is clearly bored
by having to talk to a bunch of 
scruffy looking journalists.
Yeah, I think the Starlet, you know, has a real feeling of
a kind of modernity
in the sense that she is surrounded
the paparazzi.
In this case, it's the press trying to get a quote
and she is zoning, she is just sort of 
taking herself another nicer place
and she is pretending that they are not even there.
You see that on her face.
The young woman sitting at the frilly dressing table
is a hometown glamor girl.
She looks a lot like Jean Harlow.
The star of the Frank Capra movie, Platinum Blonde
and she wears one of the most
 famous fashion items of the day.
Her dress is an adaptation of one that
 Joan Crawford wore in the film Letty Lynton.
The dress was such a hit that Macy's
sold something like 500 thousand 
copies in its department stores.
This is a little tidbit of information that was 
certainly not lost on Rockwell.
Then and now,
thousands of young men and women
 came to Hollywood every year
hoping to be discovered.
In Rockwell's day, professional 
models had the best chance
because their faces were already familiar 
from ads in magazines and newspapers.
In fact, two of the women who modeled 
for Rockwell glamor girl images
actually signed movie contracts 
after producers saw their pictures
in Saturday evening Post covers.
But most of them were not that lucky.
They ended up waiting tables or working odd jobs
like the hat check girl in this painting.
It's called, The Convention.
Rockwell is sympathetic.
She looks exhausted, discouraged
but you have to laugh at the pile of coats
 and the little red ticket she's holding.
How will she ever get all those things 
back to their rightful owners?
During this trip to Hollywood,
Rockwell met and married Mary Barstow.
Over the next 20 years,
they went back to California fairly often
so their three boys could visit their grandparents.
Rockwell always took work with him
and the movie studios had him do
 portraits of movie stars for film posters.
He even became a favorite of Hedda Hopper
the famous gossip columnist.
She wrote about him in her 
syndicated newspaper feature.
It was called, 'Looking at Hollywood'.
Rockwell also had a serious side.
You know, it was interesting
Rockwell, in a way, you know, he pushed
a benign but important agenda
of a kind of community
of a kind of civic responsibility
and also a civic responsibility to
patriotism.
You know, to understanding our nation 
by embracing our neighbor.
He did this in one frame
with one image.
He did it from many different approaches
to always the same theme
which was tolerance
of the community,
of each other, of parents - great respect for parents,
of presidents, of Boy Scouts of America,
of our veterans and soldiers fighting abroad.
Rockwell painted all night long to finish this portrait
of Charles Lindbergh for the Saturday Evening Post.
Lingbergh was the latest American hero.
It was the summer of 1927.
Lindbergh had just landed in Paris
after flying solo for 33 hours across the Atlantic.
The flight was touch and go.
The plane was so loaded with fuel
that when it took off, it barely cleared telephone lines 
at the end of the runway in New Jersey.
The weather was bad.
He flew all night long through rain and sleet 
before finally sighting land.
It was such a historic moment
that Rockwell named the painting, 'Pioneer'
and compared Lindbergh to Christopher Columbus,
and to the pioneers that crossed the continent
 to settle the American West.
On either side of Lindbergh's portrait
Rockwell included pictures of Columbus' ship
the Santa Maria
and a covered wagon.
Lindbergh's own plane, The Spirit of St. Louis,
 is in the background.
Lindbergh shows up again in Spirit of America.
This was the picture on the
 Boy Scout's calendar for 1929.
Rockwell painted a scout at the center
and behind him, in a sort of hazy blue,
we see profiles of George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln, Theodor Roosevelt,
Benjamin Franklin, a pioneer in a coon skinned cap,
and a Native American chief in a feathered head dress.
Lindbergh is over on the right.
He is the young man with the goggles on his head.
Putting all these people in the same picture
was Rockwell's way of connecting the 
Boy Scouts with great Americans.
The Boy Scouts were part of making one American
great, Steven Spielberg.
I've wanted to own a lot of the Boy Scout paintings
because, you know, the Boy Scouts was a very
important part of my life growing up.
The Boy Scouts gave me the opportunity 
to discover film making.
When I went for a photography merit badge
and I made a little eight millimeter movie
and the Boy Scouts in my troop 294
of Scottsdale, Arizona
liked the movie and made a lot of noise
and laughed and clapped and all that.
I got that great virus of
 I've got to do this the rest of my life.
I think Rockwell saw the Boy Scouts as
you know, young men,
on the homefront
who could do good deeds.
Not just help old ladies across the street,
but young boys that would be
there at the ready to help you in any situation.
I mean, Rockwell, I think, loved the Boy Scouts
 the way he loved the American military.
Rockwell was well known by the 1940's 
because of his magazine covers.
During WWll he really became a household name.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor
 on December 7th, 1941
Rockwell donated a poster to help the war effort
but he didn't feel like he was doing enough.
He said he wanted to make a bigger 
statement about why we were fighting
but he just couldn't figure out how.
One night when he couldn't sleep
he had a flash of inspiration.
One of his neighbors had spoken out in town meeting
and even though just about everybody
 disagreed with him
Rockwell said,
"they let him have a say
no one shouted him down
my gosh, I thought, that's it!
There it is, freedom of speech."
A world founded upon four essential
human freedoms.
I'll illustrate the four freedoms president Roosevelt
talked about in his state of the union speech
and use my neighbors as models.
Freedom of speech and expression.
Freedom of Speech, New England town meeting.
Freedom from want
a Thanksgiving dinner.
I'll put them in terms everybody can understand.
Any neighbor, any where in the world.
The Freedom of Speech painting in our show
is an early version of the final painting.
I like how rough and sketchy it is, you know, often
Rockwell's studies
some of them were indistinguishable 
from the final painting.
But this one was truly a study.
It's got,
it's got a lot of, I guess,
true grit.  It's got texture.
It's just a little bit
blurry.
As often, lines of
our own personal freedoms
have been made to seem blurry
over the last decade, at least.
A lot of Rockwell's magazine covers during WWII
showed soldiers on the homefront.
He said he came up with the idea for
'Little Girl Observing Lovers on a Train'
one day when he himself was on a train
packed with service men who were 
traveling with friends and family.
It's a funny picture.
But it also says a lot about the way Rockwell worked.
He talked the Rutland Railroad people
into parking a train car on a siding in Arlington, Vermont
near his studio.
He had the models pose on the train
while his photographer took 
dozens and dozens of pictures.
Then he started making sketches.
When he had worked out all the details
he made a very large, very complete drawing
that he copied onto canvas for the final painting.
Sometimes though,
he wanted to make changes even though 
the drawing was mostly finished.
So, instead of starting over
he pasted a piece of blank paper over
the part he didn't like and he drew it again.
You can see this in the paper patch
that runs from the airman's right shoulder
all the way over to the left side of the drawing.
Well, with Norman Rockwell, the
the sketches, the pencil sketches
are as illuminating and interesting
as the paintings are.
In a way,
I feel that his craft as a sketch artist is with pencil
is actually more
interesting sometimes then the
 final painting turns out to be.
When the war was over, Rockwell did several Post covers showing service men back home.
One of them, it's called 'Back to Cities',
shows a real life flying fortress pilot 
in the bedroom where he grew up.
The stuff on the dresser and the pictures on the wall
tell us a lot about his life
both before and after he went to war.
We even know his name
Lieutenant A.H. Becktoff.
It's on his duffle bag on the floor.
The insignia on his uniform jacket hanging on the chair
tells us that he served with distinction.
He received the air medal twice.
Look closely, the blue and yellow ribbon
has a tiny oak leaf cluster
I think in the Rockwell painting, Back to Cities
it establishes that when he went 
off to war, time stood still.
It probably stood still for as long as
you know, the hearts of his mother and 
father stood still waiting
and praying for his safe return.
So that bedroom represents that suspended animation
when young boys go off to war and 
they come back men.
Now in this case, he came back from war
and he still was a boy, he just was a bigger boy.
He is tall, none of the clothes fit
but everything in the room is pristine exactly as he left it.
Unlike so many veterans that come back from
from mortal combat
they return to civilization and they are changed forever
but he has not been changed forever.
The only thing that happened
over the three or four years he was gone was
he grew out of his clothes.
In 1937, the Rockwell family moved from
New Rochelle, just outside New York City to
a farm house in Arlington, Vermont.
It was a great place for Rockwell's 
three sons to grow up.
They could roam around the countryside,
swim in the river,
basically live the care-free boyhood life
that Rockwell painted in his pictures.
But in Vermont, Rockwell didn't have easy access to the professional models who posed for him in New York.
So he started using friends and their children.
The people he chose were everyday citizens
a lot like the characters in the
 famous Frank Capra movies,
like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
and it's a Wonderful Life.
Capra's and Rockwell's people are ordinary heros
just because they do the right thing.
In terms of, if you look at a period of time,
and in this case say the 30's, the late 30's early 40's,
he perfectly portrayed
the American sensibility.
Now, in movies that same sensibility was portrayed
by Frank Capra, and other directors who
had that sort of idealistic, fantasy, vision of what
we wanted America to be, or what
 we thought America was.
Most of Rockwell's models were thrilled to see their pictures on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
But not everyone wanted to think of 
themselves as ordinary.
Rockwell said he had a lot of trouble
convincing two neighbors to pose for a picture of two charwomen sitting in a theater.
He said he had to promise them
that they were only acting as charwomen
and that no one would think the worse of them for it.
With the two women sitting in a theater reading Playbill,
it shows, I mean they work there
they are cleaning the place up,
but they actually have a fascination with theater.
It is more to them then just a job
and they are interested.
It's showing that they are actually interested
 in the place they work.
Even though they have been separated
by their status.
But you can still imagine them sneaking up once in a while and watching shows.
You can imagine them watching the rehearsals.
You can image them being
proud of the fact that they work in a theater, even though all they are doing is pushing a broom.
Most of us had a favorite teacher
 when we were growing up.
Someone who was our own personal hero.
Rockwell did too.
He painted, Happy Birthday Mrs. Jones, 
as a tribute to his 8th grade teacher.
She was the one who had encouraged him 
to draw when he was a kid.
The painting of Happy Birthday Mrs. Jones
you just know by looking at the painting and
 looking into the teacher's face
that she loves every single student in that classroom
including the class clown with the eraser
 balanced on his head.
You just feel the warmth in that classroom,
and you feel that this is the best birthday gift
 anyone has ever given her.
In Happy Birthday Mrs. Jones,
you see the kid's faces through her reaction to them.
You know what their faces are looking like
even though you can't see them.
Of course in film making we strive for that, 
we strive to get images
that convey visually a lot of information
without having to spend a lot of time at it.
Norman Rockwell was a master at that. 
 He was a master of telling a story
in one frame.
Rockwell tells us a lot in the image.
We know that Mrs. Jones has just come in the door.
She is still holding her hat and coat.
We can tell from the crushed pieces of
 chalk on the floor
that the kids had to rush back to their seats when they heard her coming down the hall.
Story telling was very important with Norman Rockwell because you see every single picture
told a specific story, everyone has
either the middle or the end
of a story.
You can already see the beginning
 even though it's not there
or the middle, you can see all
 the missing parts of the story.
Because he took that one frame
that tells everything that you need to know.
Rockwell is probably best known for his pictures of kids.
He painted mischievous boys,
lady like girls,
and the funny things we all did when we thought
 we were so grown up.
Rockwell's pictures of kids are particularly meaningful
for George Lucas.
Well, in one particular piece, which is The Runaway, which is
the boy with his little
pack of worldly belongings sitting sort of 
out next to a police officer.
It's amusing,
it's part of American rituals of
children's need to break away
you know, in that case it's very ritualistic.
Which again is part of what I like, I mean, I
I sort of tend towards the more anthropological side of
art.  I'm very interested in, what does it say about us?
What does it say about our culture?
That particular thing of how
young people express themselves when they are trying to become independent.
Even, you know, before they reach the teenage years
is always fascinated me, and I like
images that record those kinds of events.
That's a particular, for whatever reason,
emotional piece for me, I really like that.
Many of Rockwell's pictures are funny
but there is a lot of truth in them, too.
Rockwell used his son Peter as the model for the boy
 on the high diving board.
Peter remembered the day he posed.
He said his father always said a good model had to be able to raise his eyebrows
halfway up his forehead to look surprised.
Peter said, and these are his words,
"I could never get my eyebrows up that far
except for that terrible time
when I had to crawl out on the end of a board he had rigged up to extend from the studio balcony."
Remember that magazine cover of the frightened 
kid out on the end of a diving board?
The boy with his eyebrows all the way up to his forehead?
Well that was me, and I was scared stiff.
I've always loved that painting. It was only later after I
I added that painting to my collection that
 I discovered that the boy
on the 3 meter high diving board peeking over the side was Rockwell's son.
That painting means a lot to me because we were all on diving boards
hundreds of times during our life
and taking the plunge or pulling back from the abyss
taking a great risk
with the status quo of your own life
is something that we must face.
For me, that painting represents every motion picture just before I commit to directing it.
Just that one moment before I say, "Yes, i'm going to direct that movie."
On Schindler's List, I mean, I probably lived 
on that diving board
for eleven years before I
eventually took the plunge.
That painting spoke to me the second I saw it.
The second I saw that that painting was 
available to add to my collection
I said, "well that is not only going
in my collection, but it's going in my office so I can look at it every day of my life."
Do you remember a time your parents had a party
and you had to go to bed?
But then, you sneaked back so that you could 
see what was going on.
Rockwell makes us feel like we are there
standing just behind the little girl who is looking down at her parent's party.
With Norman Rockwell you get a lot of
over the shoulder point of views
of sort of peeking in on a situation.
They put the viewer
in the frame which is what we do in movies.
Also we do over the shoulders, where you have the main character and you see what that person is seeing.
There is quite a bit of that that he does.
It involves the viewer, it informs the viewer about
what is the point of view of this painting,
whose vision is this?
In that particular piece,
where the little girl is on top of the stairs 
looking down at the party.
That's one of the few Rockwell's I have which is a rough
painting.  The sketches, I love the sketches,
they are very detailed, very intricate, very craftsman like.
You have the finished painting, but 
then he will do roughs
in oils which is just a rough
idea of the colors and how everything
 is going to fit together.
In that one, I love the fact,
 it's almost an abstract painting.
Because it's very, very crude.
You really get the emotion of it.  You really get the sense of what it is.
There is no ambiguity about any of it.
I like the fact that it is a
sort of an impressionistic piece
but very, very, very specific.
When we are kids, we always want to be a little older
to be able to do all the things older kids can do.
'Can't Wait' was one of the last Boy Scout calendars Rockwell ever designed.
He was thinking he would do a painting of Boy Scouts playing in a band,
so he called a friend to see if her 
son would be able to pose.
But the boy wasn't a scout, the town 
didn't even have a troop.
So he borrowed a uniform
and showed up in an outfit that was two or three sizes too big.
Rockwell took advantage of the situation.
He decided to show a Cub Scout trying on his old brother's uniform
practicing his scout salute.
It's a wonderful picture
and one that brought Rockwell's career full circle.
Back to the simplicity and morality of his early pictures
for the Boy Scout's magazine.
Just as many funny things happen when we 
get older as when we are kids.
Rockwell was in his 60s when he came up
 with the idea for the new calendar.
He rarely talked about how or why he selected the stories for his pictures.
He did explain this one.
I'll read you what he wrote.
"My picture shows two people, who after living together for many years,
have reached the stage of sympathy and compatibility
for which all of us strive.
They know their weaknesses and their strengths.
They are comfortable and secure in their relationship with each other.
And while mother presumably takes fathers strong points for granted
she is still trying tolerantly
to keep him on the straight and narrow
when signs of frailty appear."
Paintings like this are fun to do.
While they are humorous, they are also human.
an the subtle touch of forbearance 
evident in each of them
is something all of us can learn.
Throughout his long career, Rockwell painted scenes that helped us laugh at ourselves.
As often as not, he made us part of the pictures.
We feel like we are standing in the door of this office
looking at the window washer winking 
at the pretty secretary.
I think Rockwell was a great humorist,
 and so many of his paintings
are just evocative of the humor of the times, the innocent humor.
It was just Rockwell
extoling the virtues of this 1940s, 50s, and 60s innocence.
Which is how he saw America.
Rockwell wrote about the day he meet James Van Brunt.
The man, who posed for this painting.
It's called, 'The Gossips'.
He wrote this about it.
"I remember it was June and terribly hot
I was working in my underwear
and not getting along too well because 
my brushes were slippery with perspiration.
Suddenly the downstairs door banged
and I heard someone coming up the stairs
treading on each step with a loud deliberate thump.
A tiny old man with a knobby nose,
and immense drooping mustache,
and round heavy lidded eyes stamped into the studio."
Well, Rockwell had wanted to do a painting of three old ladies gossiping.
The only problem was
he hadn't been able to find any old ladies who were funny looking enough.
So he asked Van Brunt to shave off his mustache
and had him pose for all three figures.
Rockwell said he laughed himself silly
at the way Van Brunt pranced around the studio.
In the long skirts and little hats.
I just know that,
when I looked at The Gossips
for the first time
it wasn't just the Bettys
in Iowa
in some small town gossiping about
an affair that a neighbor had.
I saw that painting of these three women
almost like a coven
very very close together.
They are very careful that whatever they gossip about doesn't leak beyong their
little sewing circle.
It just reminded me of the gossips of
you know, the Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s
the Hedda Hoppers of the world, the Walter Winchells.
Sometimes Rockwell's pictures connected with subjects that were in the news.
'The Jury' is one of them.
It makes us chuckle at the idea of a 
determined young woman
being pressued by the 11 other members of a jury panel.
All of whom happen to be men.
But he was also pointing to a subject that was controversial at the time.
In 1959 when he painted The Jury,
three states still prohibited women 
from serving on state juries.
The painting also has a lot in common
with the plot of the Henry Fonda movie,
'12 Angry Men'.
It had come out just two years earlier.
In the jury room, you know, how long
 had they been trying
to convince the only holdout who happened
 to be a woman,
surrounded by 11 male jurors,
how long had they been trying to 
get her to change her mind?
Well, you can tell by her position, her straight back
and you can tell by the sloppiness of all the other jurors
who have found comfortable positions
around the table to try to convince her
to change her vote.
But then you look on the floor and you see
 all of the cigarette buts.
And you understand that this has been going on
to the point that perhaps she is going to hang that jury.
In 1960,
The Saturday Evening Post published Rockwell's autobiography.
It's full of stories about his childhood,
about his models,
and about the editors and art directors he worked with.
He comes across as a modest friendly guy
with a gentle sense of humor.
He drew the triple self portrait
for the cover of the issue that had the first installment of his personal story.
Rockwell shows himself three different ways.
In the image on the easel,
he is sophisticated and urbain
a man who is comfortable
in the multimillion dollar worlds of 
magazine publishing and advertising.
Another image shows the back of a 
humble artist sitting on a low stool.
The third is supposedly the real Rockwell.
The man whose face is reflected in the mirror.
In that wonderful study of his self portrait,
the triple portrait,
as he is leading off to the side, 
you see the mirror and you see
you know, his face reflected in the mirror, 
but yet you don't see his eyes.
Because the reflection in his glasses erases his eyes.
I think that is a way of Rockwell
transferring the point of view
to the audience.
There are all sorts of
the debris of his personal life
scattered throughout all of his work, as there is
in any work of art.
From film making to architecture
you know, there is smoke coming
 out of the waste of his basket
because his art studio burned down
and burned to the ground many
paintings that we will never get a chance to see
at the Rockwell museum in Stockbridge or anywhere else for that matter.
I think that was a little,
you know, sad memory
for him of
the art that went up in flames that year.
By 1963,
Rockwell had been doing magazine 
covers for more than 50 years.
But things weren't going well at the Post.
Television was drawing advertising away,
and some of the companies that advertised in the Post thought Rockwell was too old fashioned.
He painted, 'The Connoisseur', during this upheaval.
In the image, a well dressed older man
stands in front of a drip painting that
 looks like a Jackson Pollock.
It's abstract, it's the newest thing
and a far cry from the realistic story pictures
 Rockwell had painted his whole life.
Although he never explained the picture
it's tempting to speculate that The Connoisseur
 is a metaphor for Rockwell himself
as he is wondering what lies ahead.
It reminded me of
Alfred Hitchcock
somewhat of a portly man
in finery and a bowler hat
standing there looking at
the next wave.
Looking at Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda 
about to make Easy Rider.
Rockwell parted ways with The Post a year after he painted, 'The Connoisseur'.
He Immediately started working with Look magazine.
For the next 15 years,
many of his pictures dealt with contemporary issues.
One of them was the space program.
Others addressed troubling social problems
including segregation.
But many of them also reaffirmed hope.
Look published, 'A Time for Greatness' the week of the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
It was a memorial to President John F. Kennedy
eight months after his assassination.
Rockwell showed Kennedy as a visionary
gazing out beyond the crowds and the banners.
The title came from one of Kennedy's campaign slogans.
The painting is at the National Democratic Convention.
It just was the promise
of America, the promise that Kennedy
made to America.
If he were to be elected
you know, he would go on to do great things.
and that was, the painting that, for me
represented what America could have become
had Kennedy been allowed to serve eight years.
Over the course of half a century,
Norman Rockwell brought us face to face with ourselves
He made us laugh,
and he showed us who we are.
He symbolized what America held the most dear,
what the American ideal was at that 
particular point in time
for those twenty or thirty years
that he was extremely popular.
Not only was he popular, but at the same 
time he really captured
societies ambitions,
and emotions.
As corny as they are, that's what they are, 
that's what America is.
I'd like to invite you to come see 
Rockwell's stories for yourself
here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
 in Washington, D.C.
As always, the Smithsonian Institution is free.
The exhibition will be on view from July 2nd, 2010
until January 2nd, 2011.
I'd very much like to thank Smithsonian Folkways
for the use of their music on this podcast.
