(2 DVDs about Rockwell’s life, career, and influence; the first one very well-done)
Rockwell was the celebrated major magazine illustrator from the early 1900s into the 1970s. His impressive work appeared on the covers of Saturday Evening Post and Look magazines. In the case of the Post, every month his work entered the homes of millions of Americans over the decades. His work was hugely popular because of its nostalgia, its fundamental decency, and common-ground human experiences.
He did many covers about leisure, childhood, relationships, home life, wars, etc. His tone was consistently idealistic and upbeat. He represented the best of American values as in the four Freedom covers inspired by a Roosevelt speech.
Eventually he began to include more realistic subjects such as the non-caucasian characters in the famous covers about the girl walking to an integrated Southern school with soldiers or the violent deaths of three murdered civil rights workers. Rockwell was, unquestionably, the most popular American painter of the 20th century and his work spoke to way more ordinary people than say, Wyeth, Warhol, or Pollock.
I went back to his work recently because it evokes the original, romantic American Dream and remains thoughtfully reassuring despite the many upheavals and social changes of the last century. And because it is the total opposite from the current, corrupt, politically-divisive American Dream.
“Freedom from Fear”, 1942