Reference photo for Norman Rockwell's "Day in the Life of a Little Girl," 1952. Photo montage created by Ron Schick. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL. From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum.
Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA
November 7, 2009 through May 31, 2010
Photography has been a benevolent tool for artists from Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas to David Hockney. And to illustrators, always on the lookout for better ways to meet deadlines, the camera has long been a natural ally. But the thousands of photographs Norman Rockwell created as studies for his iconic images are a case apart. A natural storyteller, Rockwell envisioned his narrative scenarios down to the smallest detail. Yet at the easel he was an absolute literalist who rarely painted directly from his imagination.
Instead, he first brought his ideas to life in studio sessions, staging photographs that are fully realized works of art in their own right. Selecting props and locations, choosing and directing his models, he carefully orchestrated each element of his design for the camera before beginning to paint. Meticulously composed and richly detailed, Norman Rockwell’s study photographs mirror his masterworks in a tangible parallel universe. Photography opened a door to the keenly observed authenticity that defines Norman Rockwell’s art. And for us today it is a revelation to discover that so many of his most memorable characters were, in fact, real people.
Curator and author Ron Schick is the first to undertake a frame-by-frame study of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s newly digitized photography archive, the product of a just-completed two-year “Save America’s Treasures” project that has preserved the artist’s archive of almost 20,000 negatives and made accessible the full range of the artist’s photography. His forthcoming book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, will be published by Little, Brown and Company in 2009.
This exhibition is terrific. I was particularly struck by the versimillitude of the way that Rockwell worked – tracing directly from his photographs (a practice he was very conflicted about, but felt was necessary considering his overwhelming deadlines). In the “Doctor’s Office” painting, there are numerous small details in the room that I always interpreted as being “put” there by Rockwell in an attempt to make the scene more sentimental or patriotic. Imagine my suprise on seeing that the details were already there in the photos, items that were “in situ” at the doctor’s office to start with! Marvelous.
On a related note, a photographer associate of mine is wondering about the role of image ownership/licensing and copyright that the images in the collection represent. I suppose that most of the photographers who worked with Rockwell (there were 3 main ones and a few short-term shooters) were functionally employees of his, so the rights would have resided with the “business” entity that was Norman Rockwell. But it would be interesting to see some discussion on this question.
[...] ideas and then painted them. His museum here in the states is running an exhibition of said photos.Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera*|*Norman Rockwell Museum Love & Bass __________________ Come in below me. craigblankphoto.com [...]