December 11, 2003
All I Want For Christmas by Norman Rockwell
We all have images we associate with Norman Rockwell that tend to evoke a Currier and Ives or Saturday Evening Post quiet American family image. I saw a PBS special on Rockwell a couple Christmases ago and was enthralled with some of his lesser know civil rights paintings. I asked for a print of Southern Justice for my birthday and the next Christmas, but it was hard to find even a mention of it in most places. It looks like the Rockwell copyright holders have loosened the reigns a bit on Rockwell’s image and are starting to authorize his darker paintings for release. Here’s a nice article about Rockwell on a Finnish site.
It has been said that Norman Rockwell was a conservative with a small ‘c’ in his love for small-town and rural America, but liberal with a capital ‘L’ when it came to the crunch. Whenever he felt the cause was right, he was ready to fight for it. World War II had inspired Rockwell to paint with a purpose: the civil rights movement, astronauts, the Peace Corps, and poverty programs. This phase of artistic activism produced some of Rockwell’s finest works. “Look” magazine published two of his most famous civil-rights pictures.
