Norman Rockwell "Behind the Camera"
Brooklyn Museum
This event has ended.
To create many of his iconic, quintessentially American paintings, most of which served as magazine covers, the renowned illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) worked from carefully staged study photographs. More than a hundred of those photographic studies are on view here for the first time, alongside the paintings for which they were done, in an exhibition organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, following a two-year project to preserve and digitize almost twenty thousand negatives.
Early in his career Rockwell used professional models for his paintings. Eventually, however, he found that this method inhibited his evolving naturalistic style, and beginning in the late 1930s he adopted photography as a tool to bring his ideas to life. Working with skilled photographers, he acted as a director, orchestrating every detail of a picture, including props, locations, and models (usually his friends and neighbors). He ordered numerous photographs for each new subject, sometimes complete compositions and in other instances separate pictures of individual elements.
In addition to the photographs and their related paintings, the exhibition includes drawings, magazine tear sheets, photographic equipment, archival letters, and an introductory film. Visitors are likely to recognize several iconic magazine covers from both The Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell worked for nearly fifty years, and Look magazine, with which he had a decade-long relationship.
Among the highlights of the exhibition are two famous Rockwell paintings from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. One, The Tattoo Artist, depicts a young sailor stoically having his arm tattooed, while the other, the watercolor Dugout, portrays the Chicago Cubs being jeered by fans of the Boston Braves. Shown alongside their working photographs and the 1940s Saturday Evening Post covers for which they were done, the paintings can be seen in a new light.
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Schedule
from November 19, 2010 to April 10, 2011