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| One section of the illustration Stockbridge at Christmas. |
Whether or not you have plans to visit Stockbridge this year, you might want to read about Norman Rockewell. Though he was a talented artist who was loved by the public, he also struggled the opinions of art critics. If you want to learn more about him, here are some books to start with.
By Laura P. Claridge
Norman Rockwell’s successful career as a painter and illustrator has made him an American icon. However, the popularity of his idealized, nostalgic depictions have caused him to be considered not a serious artist but a “mere illustrator”–a disparagement reinforced by the memorable covers he drew for The Sunday Evening Post. Based on private family archives and interviews, this book reveals the driven workaholic who had three complicated marriages and was a distant father. Critically acclaimed author Claridge also breaks new ground with her reappraisal of Rockwell’s art, arguing that despite his sentimental style, his artistry was masterful and complex.
Norman Rockwell's America
By Christopher Finch
Full-color and black-and-white reproductions of paintings, illustrations, and designs from the popular American artist-illustrator's sixty-year career are combined with a succinct text to provide a survey of Rockwell's skills and achievements as artist and visual social commentator.
By John Kirk
America's best-loved artist, Norman Rockwell, presented a cornucopia of images throughout his career. He was fond of linking his subject matter to holidays and seasons - to Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or New Year's Day - but above all to Christmas. If Rockwell can be remembered for any one body of work, it must be this. From December 9, 1916, when Rockwell's first Christmas cover for the Saturday Evening Post appeared, and continuing for three decades, the artist's annual Post Christmas cover was practically a national institution. As the clamor for Rockwell's Christmas paintings increased, he produced them for other magazines, and for cards, ads, illustrations, and calendars. This book features more than 50 full-color reproductions of Rockwell's most beloved Christmas season paintings, selected from every phase of his career and spanning a period of 60 years.
By Deborah Solomon
A biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people ideals of America. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white school―here was an America whose citizens seemed to believe in equality. But who was the man who served as our unofficial "artist in chief"? Behind the folksy facade lay a a lonely painter suffering from depression and consumed by a sense of inadequacy. He was in treatment with the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, and moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts so that he and his wife could be near Austen Riggs, a leading psychiatric hospital. According to the author, "Rockwell's personal desire for inclusion and normalcy spoke to the national desire for inclusion and normalcy".
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