The Problem's We All Share, Norman Rockwell

“Perhaps there never was a country like the one on the cover of the  Post, that I was stubbornly painting the best vision of us.”

– Norman Rockwell

When you imagine Norman Rockwell’s America you don’t usually think of it as a segregated one, but it was.  And when you remember Norman Rockwell, you don’t typically recall an influential civil rights artist, but he was.  Or so I discovered at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA.

While the rather small museum displays only a tiny fraction of Rockwell’s reported 4,000 works, many of which were lost to fire, it contains some of his most famous.  Within its walls, visitors will find the hopeful and entertaining paintings like Runaway, Going and Coming, and Freedom From Want, that are most associated with Rockwell’s 47 year career as a Saturday Evening Post illustrator.  But they’ll also find the more serious, and powerful work of Rockwell’s later life when, after leaving the Post, he turned to topics of civil rights and poverty.  It was these images I found most intriguing and surprising.  I’d always known that Norman Rockwell was a good illustrator.  At the museum I discovered he was a good man as well.