Cover Stories

My time here at the Norman Rockwell Museum is winding down--I have two more weeks in front of me, and I intend to make the most of them! Just yesterday I finished a project I've been working on for just about the whole summer, squeezing it in whenever I didn't have a more pressing assignment. Back in June, my bosses asked me to spend some time in the Stockbridge Room, which houses all of the over 300 Saturday Evening Post covers that Norman Rockwell painted. These are framed magazine covers, mind you--not Rockwell's original oil paintings, which are exhibited upstairs. They asked me to look at the covers, and find prominent authors and/or public figures that wrote for or were featured in the magazine.

Now, this project is interesting for a couple reasons. First of all, one of the most frequent comments our visitors make is that they're surprised by the size of Rockwell's originals! They walk into the galleries expecting to see magazine-sized artwork and are frequently blown away by the canvases that are two, three, and four feet wide (you can read about one visitor's experience at her personal blog here). But working at the Museum, I've found that an opposite phenomenon occurs. It's easy to forget that the huge paintings in the galleries were made to be printed and reproduced, and sometimes even covered with text describing the Post's stories that particular week.



Now, Rockwell rarely painted a cover that actually related to the articles inside the magazine--they were self-contained stories on their own part. The exception to that rule was when he painted politicians on some later covers--Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Rockwell claimed was his most expressive model of all time, and later John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon during their contentious 1960 presidential race.

So throughout the summer I spent an hour or so whenever I could hunkered in the Stockbridge Room, scanning names and finding celebrities in the Post like Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Ford, Groucho Marx, Katharine Hepburn, and even Norman Rockwell himself (the Post did a retrospective on his work in 1955). I also wrote down a lot of names that sounded familiar but who I had no idea who they were. I learned that Boris Karloff, who always sounded like a politician to me, was actually the actor who played Frankenstein, and that Jack Lemmon, who I had in my mind as a prominent golfer, was a (very famous) actor. I think Rockwell or anyone of his generation would be sorely disappointed in me!

The good news, though, is that now with this information we can develop tours that incorporate the content of the Post with the art of Norman Rockwell. And as an added bonus, my knowledge of mid-20th century American pop culture is at an all-time high!