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. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..
Let’s study art history together.
Breaking Home Ties
| Artist | Norman Rockwell |
|---|---|
| Year | 1954 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 112 cm × 112 cm (44 in × 44 in) |
| Location | Private collection |
There’s a right of passage, usually, wherein a person gets old enough to leave home by him or herself for the first time. That day is fraught with emotion and feeling. You can get a sense of that in this piece, too. The boy is upright, eager, and a little nervous. His father sits slumped, perhaps feeling a sense of loss, with the end of an era approaching. Even the dog seems to be aware that something big is about to happen.
If you look a little longer, you see some other details emerge as well. The father is in his work clothes. In the painting, his work is sitting on the bench beside him. Perhaps he’s hunched because he does not know yet whether he did his job well enough. That answer might have to wait until the boy returns. The boy is dressed in his finest clothes. Maybe he’s aiming to impress someone where he’s going, or maybe it’s symbolic of the blue collar father living his son into a white collar world.
In any case it’s a powerful and timeless scene.
(more via wiki)
Breaking Home Ties is a painting by American illustrator Norman Rockwell, created for the September 25, 1954, cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The picture represents a father and son waiting for a train that will take the young man to the state university. The painting, considered by experts to be one of Rockwell’s masterworks, is also one of the most widely reproduced, and was voted the second-most popular image in Post history.
Description
The details of the picture, as with most of Rockwell’s works, tell a story, in this case a story of endings and beginnings, as a boy from New Mexico leaves home for the first time. The young man, his father and a dog, sit on the running board of the family’s stakesided farm truck. The ticket protruding from the son’s pocket, and the single rail visible at the lower corner of the painting, by which the trio sit, suggest that they are at a whistle stop waiting for the train.
The son’s books are stacked on a new suitcase bearing a “State U” pennant. With his tie and socks perfectly matched, wearing pressed white trousers and matching jacket, he is ready for his new life in college. The young man’s shoes are shined to a polished gleam, as, hands folded, and with the family dog resting his head in his lap, his gaze focuses eagerly toward the horizon, and on the next chapter in his life.
In contrast, the father sits slumped with both his and his son’s hats clutched in his hand, as if reluctant to let him go. The direction of his gaze is opposite to his son’s. The tag from a Bull Durham tobacco satchel dangles, near at hand, from his shirt pocket. There is a red flag and a lantern at the ready, near his right hand, atop a well-used trunk. With the son’s luggage unloaded and waiting next to them, there is nothing left for him to do but signal the train to stop, and his pose suggests that he is looking up the track, dreading the imminent arrival of the train that will carry his son away.
Though the two figures are not looking at each other, their legs are touching and emphasize the strong sense of family ties.
History
The painting was shown in many locations over many years, including Washington, D.C.‘s Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1955, and in Moscow and Cairo in 1964. It was also the inspiration for an eponymous 1987 TV movie, featuring Jason Robards and Doug McKeon as the father and son.
In 2003, the painting was put on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum, which was its first public showing in over 25 years. Despite some experts noticing discrepancies between the painting on display and the published Post image, the painting on display was believed to be the original.
Finding the original
In 1962, the painting had been purchased for $900 by cartoonist Don Trachte, a friend of Rockwell’s, and was in his ownership until his death in May 2005. In March 2006, two of his sons found a hidden area in Trachte’s house, which contained several paintings, including Breaking Home Ties. Further investigation found that Trachte had created copies of several paintings he owned, and hidden the originals, unknown to his family. Thus, the Breaking Home Ties that had been put on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in 2003 was actually a replica. The museum later placed the original on display, along with the replica.
2006 sale
On November 29, 2006, Sotheby’s sold the original painting at auction for $15.4 million, which at the time was a record sum paid for a Rockwell work. The buyer or buyers chose to remain anonymous.
This painting stirs up in me the same conflicted emotions that I suspect we are supposed to believe the father feels. We take for granted in modern times that what we see in the image is normal and should be expected. That was not always the case, though. The reason a person’s surname might be “Baker” for example is that his ancestors, at some point in the far distant past, were bakers – a vocation passed down from father to son, and then to his son, and so on. Family and community stayed together. The story of the Western world over the last 80 years has been one of mobility and “found family.” It’s certainly true that people moved and migrated throughout history, but it was never just the normal course of things for every generation. And it was certainly not true that the friends we pick up along the way were an adequate replacement for the people who share our blood and DNA. And yet… nearly everything in our culture, for a long time, has tried to convince us otherwise.
It just doesn’t sit well with me.
For a great review of this painting, and perhaps a more optimistic one, I recommend the following:
