CURRICULUM SUPERFRIENDS: Norman Rockwell - America's Most Beloved Painter

Norman Rockwell - America's Most Beloved Painter

"I call myself an illustrator but I am not an illustrator. Instead, I paint storytelling pictures which are quite popular but unfashionable." "Unfashionable" was a misnomer; his works were in fact very popular. He was extremely sensitive to the way the art world as well as the public judged him. "No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He's got to put all of his talent, all of his feeling into them. If illustration is not considered art, then that is something that we have brought upon ourselves by not considering ourselves artists. I believe that we should say, "I am not just an illustrator, I am an artist." - Norman Rockwell
http://www.painterlog.com/2013/06/norman-rockwell-americas-most-beloved.html

Norman Rockwell - Triple Self Portrait, 1960

The Problem We All Live With

Since his work is categorized as illustration and was most famously featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, fine art critics were slow to acknowledge the importance of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) as true artist, though his work was enormously popular during his lifetime and has endured as a crucial element in America's perception of itself in the 20th century. Through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1950s and 60s, Rockwell illustrations were a part of daily life, showing, as he once said, "the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. "Norman Rockwell was one of the most prolific and well-known of American artists. During his 47-year career as a painter and illustrator, he depicted people and situations from everyday life. By his death in 1978, his work was familiar to millions of people, and remains iconic today.