Norman Rockwell: Paintings, Biography, Artwork, Book, History, Interesting Facts (2001)

Bookmark this fantastic narrative video on Black
in artwork !!

Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375504532/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0375504532&linkCode=as2&tag=tra0c7-20&linkId=da5c7581186483592926c8a780cae979

His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell’s works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter, The Problem We All Live With, Saying Grace, and the Four Freedoms series. He also is noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), during which he produced covers for their publication Boys’ Life, calendars, and other illustrations. These works include popular images that reflect the Scout Oath and Scout Law such as The Scoutmaster, A Scout is Reverent, and A Guiding Hand among many others.

Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than four thousand original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell also was commissioned to illustrate more than forty books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976 (Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America), were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the “Four Seasons” illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for seventeen years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He painted six images for Coca-Cola advertising. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “God Bless the Hills”, which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell’s œuvre as an illustrator.

In 1969, as a tribute to Rockwell’s seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, officials of Brown & Bigelow and the Boy Scouts of America asked Rockwell to pose in Beyond the Easel, the calendar illustration that year.

Many of his works appear overly sweet in the opinion of modern critics, especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life. This has led to the often-deprecatory adjective, “Rockwellesque”. Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a “serious painter” by some contemporary artists, who regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch. Writer Vladimir Nabokov sneered that Rockwell’s brilliant technique was put to “banal” use, and wrote in his book Pnin: “That Dalí is really Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood”. He is called an “illustrator” instead of an artist by some critics, a designation he did not mind, as that was what he called himself.

In the film Empire of the Sun, a young boy (played by Christian Bale) is put to bed by his loving parents in a scene also inspired by a Rockwell painting—a reproduction of which is later kept by the young boy during his captivity in a prison camp (“Freedom from Fear”, 1943).
The 1994 film Forrest Gump includes a shot in a school that re-creates Rockwell’s “Girl with Black Eye” with young Forrest in place of the girl. Much of the film drew heavy visual inspiration from Rockwell’s art.
Film director George Lucas owns Rockwell’s original of “The Peach Crop”, and his colleague Steven Spielberg owns a sketch of Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait. Each of the artworks hangs in the respective filmmaker’s work space. Rockwell is a major character in an episode of Lucas’ Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, “Passion for Life.”
In 2005, Target Co. sold Marshall Field’s to Federated Department Stores. After the sale, Federated discovered that Rockwell’s The Clock Mender displayed in the store was a reproduction. Rockwell had donated the painting, which depicts a repairman setting the time on one of the Marshall Field and Company Building clocks, and was depicted on the cover of the November 3, 1945 Saturday Evening Post, to the store in 1948. Target has since donated the original to the Chicago History Museum.
On an anniversary of Norman Rockwell’s birth, on February 3, 2010, Google featured Rockwell’s iconic image of young love “Boy and Girl Gazing at the Moon”, which also is known as “Puppy Love”, on its home page. The response was so great that day that the Norman Rockwell museum’s servers went down under the onslaught.
“Dreamland”, a track from Canadian alternative rock band Our Lady Peace’s 2009 album Burn Burn, was inspired by Rockwell paintings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rockwell

Videosource

Tell us what you think. Share your thoughts in the comments . Thank you