Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition.

Let’s study art history together.

Freedom From Want

Artist	Norman Rockwell
Year	1943
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	116.2 cm × 90 cm (45.75 in × 35.5 in)
Location	Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, United States

This will seem crazy to someone born after about 1995, but there was once a time in the United States wherein famous works of art were created on the basis of Presidential State of the Union addresses.

The painting above was inspired by FDR’s 1941 State of the Union address. I guess that was an exceptional circumstance, wherein the painting and its inspiration were concerned.

Freedom From Want is one painting in a series – based on the four freedoms described in the address above. (via wiki)

Freedom from Want, also known as The Thanksgiving Picture or I’ll Be Home for Christmas, is the third of the Four Freedoms series of four oil paintings by American artist Norman Rockwell. The works were inspired by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s 1941 State of the Union Address, known as Four Freedoms.

The painting was created in November 1942 and published in the March 6, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. All of the people in the picture were friends and family of Rockwell in Arlington, Vermont, who were photographed individually and painted into the scene. The work depicts a group of people gathered around a dinner table for a holiday meal. Having been partially created on Thanksgiving Day to depict the celebration, it has become an iconic representation for Americans of the Thanksgiving holiday and family holiday gatherings in general. The Post published Freedom from Want with a corresponding essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the Four Freedoms series. Despite many who endured sociopolitical hardships abroad, Bulosan’s essay spoke on behalf of those enduring the socioeconomic hardships domestically, and it thrust him into prominence.

The painting has had a wide array of adaptations, parodies, and other uses, such as for the cover for the 1946 book Norman Rockwell, Illustrator. Although the image was popular at the time in the United States and remains so, it caused resentment in Europe where the masses were enduring wartime hardship. Artistically, the work is highly regarded as an example of mastery of the challenges of white-on-white painting and as one of Rockwell’s most famous works.

Background

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

—Roosevelt‘s 1941 State of the Union address introducing the theme of the Four Freedoms

Freedom from Want is the third in a series of four oil paintings entitled Four Freedoms by Norman Rockwell. They were inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address, known as Four Freedoms, delivered to the 77th United States Congress on January 6, 1941. In the early 1940s, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms themes were still vague and abstract to many, but the government used them to help boost patriotism. The Four Freedoms’ theme was eventually incorporated into the Atlantic Charter, and it became part of the charter of the United Nations. The series of paintings ran in The Saturday Evening Post accompanied by essays from noted writers on four consecutive weeks: Freedom of Speech (February 20), Freedom of Worship (February 27), Freedom from Want (March 6), and Freedom from Fear (March 13). Eventually, the series was widely distributed in poster form and became instrumental in the U.S. Government War Bond Drive.

Description

The illustration is an oil painting on canvas, measuring 45.75 by 35.5 inches (116.2 cm × 90.2 cm). The Norman Rockwell Museum describes it as a story illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, complementary to the theme, but the image is also an autonomous visual expression.

The painting shows an aproned matriarch presenting a roasted turkey to a family of several generations, in Rockwell’s idealistic presentation of family values. The patriarch looks on with fondness and approval from the head of the table, which is the central element of the painting. Its creased tablecloth shows that this is a special occasion for “sharing what we have with those we love”, according to Lennie Bennett. The table has a bowl of fruit, celery, pickles, and what appears to be cranberry sauce. There is a covered silver serving dish that would traditionally hold potatoes, according to Richard Halpern, but Bennett describes this as a covered casserole dish. The servings are less prominent than the presentation of white linen, white plates and water-filled glasses. The people in the painting are not yet eating, and the painting contrasts the empty plates and vacant space in their midst with images of overabundance.

Production

Our cook cooked it, I painted it and we ate it. That was one of the few times I’ve ever eaten the model.

—Rockwell

In mid-June Rockwell sketched in charcoal the Four Freedoms and sought commission from the Office of War Information (OWI). He was rebuffed by an official who said, “The last war, you illustrators did the posters. This war, we’re going to use fine arts men, real artists.” However, Saturday Evening Post editor Ben Hibbs recognized the potential of the set and encouraged Rockwell to produce them right away. By early fall, the authors for the Four Freedoms had submitted their essays. Rockwell was concerned that Freedom from Want did not match Bulosan’s text. In mid-November, Hibbs wrote Rockwell pleading that he not scrap his third work to start over. Hibbs alleviated Rockwell’s thematic concern; he explained that the illustrations only needed to address the same topic rather than be in unison. Hibbs pressured Rockwell into completing his work by warning him that the magazine was on the verge of being compelled by the government to place restrictions on four-color printing, so Rockwell had better get the work published before relegation to halftone printing.

In 1942, Rockwell decided to use neighbors as models for the series. In Freedom from Want, he used his living room for the setting and relied on neighbors for advice, critical commentary, and their service as his models. For Freedom from Want, Rockwell photographed his cook as she presented the turkey on Thanksgiving Day 1942. He said that he painted the turkey on that day and that, unlike Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Worship, this painting was not difficult to execute. Rockwell’s wife Mary is in this painting, and the family cook, Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton, is placing in front of Mr. Wheaton (who is the man standing at the end of the table) the turkey that the Rockwell family ate that day. The nine adults and two children depicted were photographed in Rockwell’s studio and painted into the scene later. The models are (clockwise from Mr. and Mrs. Wheaton) Lester Brush, Florence Lindsey, Rockwell’s mother Nancy, Jim Martin, Dan Walsh, Mary Rockwell, Charles Lindsey, and the Hoisington children, Bill and Shirley. Jim Martin appears in all four paintings in the series. Shirley Hoisington, the girl at the end of the table, was six at the time.

After the Four Freedoms series ran in The Saturday Evening Post, the magazine made sets of reproductions available to the public and received 25,000 orders. Additionally the OWI, which six months earlier had declined to employ Rockwell to promote the Four Freedoms, requested 2.5 million sets of posters featuring the Four Freedoms for its war-bond drive in early 1943.

Rockwell bequeathed this painting to a custodianship that became the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and it is now part of the museum’s permanent collection. Rockwell lived in Stockbridge from 1953 until his death in 1978

I feel lucky to have lived without hunger or want. That’s not the normal experience of humanity on this planet and I do not take that for granted. I hope that my descendants and their countrymen are as fortunate as I have been.

I also wonder which American artist could best sell a modern U.S. State of the Union Address to the public. I mentioned that “an exceptional circumstance” created the situation wherein a State of the Union address led to this painting and its fame. Well, I don’t know if you watch the news, but the WW3 talk continues to ratchet up. As much as I don’t like it, we might be entering into a time of exceptional circumstances once again. Who would be our modern Norman Rockwell? What would the medium be? I don’t think there is a painter, currently, who could capture the national imagination the way that Rockwell did in the 40s. Perhaps a video? Is the answer Mr. Beast?

Pray for peace.