Norman Rockwell show comes to Atlanta

By MICHAEL BOYLAN
Weekend Editor

Small town America, at least the idea of it, lives in the form of ideals inside our minds.

One sees houses surrounded by white picket fences, children playing outside with small dogs named Spot, big family dinners, and the security of a place where everyone knows everyone else. Everyone in that perfect vision is a character, from the policeman to the town veterinarian and the man who put faces to those characters is Norman Rockwell.

Rockwell, one of the century's more famous artists and illustrators, is making headlines again as a national museum tour showcasing his amazing amount of work starts this week at the High Museum in Atlanta. The show will feature more than 70 of his paintings and all 322 covers of the Saturday Evening Post, which he illustrated.

Rockwell started his career at an early age, studying at the Art Students League and drawing his first cover for the Post at the age of 22. The major themes in his work were patriotic and often humorous visions of America and its citizens.

From 1926 until 1976, Rockwell illustrated the Boy Scouts Calendar, sticking to the major themes that run through all of his work. Rockwell also did work for Ladies Home Journal and Look magazine.

Perhaps what defines Rockwell best as an artist is his famous series of posters based on a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The paintings are called The Four Freedoms and they are based on the four principles mentioned by the president as the country prepared to enter the second world war. The principles are: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God in your own way, everywhere in the world, freedom from want, meaning economic stability, and freedom from fear, meaning disarmament.

Rockwell believed in America and the nation shared and believed in that vision, too. In some ways they still do.

While Rockwell's work was enormously popular with the public, critics scoffed early on. The same things that appealed to average people: the reverence for everyday events, the way the pictures resembled photographs, soured critics until near the end of Rockwell's career. It was only recently that critical acclaim gravitated toward Rockwell's work and, as with many great artists, it came posthumously.

He was always a successful and popular artist, but he wanted to be recognized as a great artist by the men and women who spend their time debating the greatness of artists.

The museum tour has many museums anxiously awaiting what is sure to be a major attraction. People who followed Rockwell's career from the beginning will take in, and be taken in, by masterpieces that have almost become part of the nation's consciousness, as will new generations, who will be seeing that idyllic little burg that resided in Rockwell's mind's eye for the first time.

The show, Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, will run at the High Museum from Nov. 6 to Jan. 30. Tickets can be purchased by calling 404-733-5000 or Ticketmaster at 404-249-6400. There will be lectures, workshops, and seminars running through the show as well.

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