Artist

Norman Rockwell

born New York City 1894-died Stockbridge, MA 1978
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Norman Rockwell, © Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0002116
Also known as
  • Norman Percevel Rockwell
Born
New York, New York, United States
Died
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, United States
Biography

Illustrator. A prolific artist, Rockwell created more than 300 covers for The Saturday Evening Post in addition to illustrating calendars, books, posters and advertisements. His work immortalized American family values and homespun characters. Four Freedoms (1943), a series of illustrations he created for the World War II effort, is the best known.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

Exhibitions

An image of a man making shadow puppets on the wall in the background and three children watching in the foreground.
Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg
July 1, 2010January 2, 2011
Telling Stories is the first major exhibition to explore in-depth the connections between Norman Rockwell's iconic images of American life and the movies.

Related Books

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Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg
Norman Rockwell’s pictures tell stories—of children growing up and of couples growing old—that make us laugh with warmhearted recognition. Rockwell was a master humorist with an infallible sense of the dramatic moment. Like a movie director, he determined the pose and facial expression of each character, positioned each prop, and lighted his sets for maximum scenic effect. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg encountered Rockwell’s magazine covers as boys. The painter’s stories, and the ideals they reflect, fascinated these two friends and sometime collaborators and drew them to value, and collect, the work of Norman Rockwell. In this book, Virginia Mecklenburg traces Rockwell’s career using works from the collections of Lucas and Spielberg as guideposts. She also explores Rockwell’s fascination with Hollywood and his elaborate creative process wherein he assumed a role remarkably like that of a film director. In a separate essay, Todd McCarthy describes Rockwell’s cinematic techniques and draws parallels between Rockwell’s subjects and those of Hollywood directors, including Lucas and Spielberg.