Norman Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978)
Freedom From Want, 1943
(Reproduced in March 6, 1943 The Saturday Evening Post)
this is a reproduction of a Buy War Bonds poster
Original: oil on canvas, 116.2 cm × 90 cm
Original: oil on canvas, 116.2 cm × 90 cm
I’ve never liked Norman Rockwell’s work (well, at least since adolescence turned me into a cynic). His version of America was too white, too saccharine, too much sunny nostalgia for my taste. (If you’ve seen the film Pleasantville you know what I mean). However, art historians have begun reconsidering this artist’s work in context and examining his life a little more closely. I’m starting to come around. As it turns out, Rockwell may have been painting away some demons.
Today, on this most national of holidays, I couldn’t write about anything else but Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom from Want, a painting that has come to be known as the Thanksgiving painting. It was one of a series of four paintings the artist produced in response to President Franklin Roosevelt’s State of the Union address of 1941, often called the “Four Freedoms” speech.
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.—Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941
By the end of that year the United States had entered into World War II.
The Saturday Evening Post published essays on the Four Freedoms in February and March of 1943 accompanied by Rockwell’s illustrations. Students in the “Town Meeting” class taught by Maura MacNeil and me studied Freedom of Speech which Rockwell considered to be the most successful of the series (and I’ll write about that at some other time). However, Rockwell’s image of three generations of a white, middle class family gathered around an abundantly set Thanksgiving table as an illustration of Freedom from Want has become the best known and most beloved of this series. It is important to think about the impact this charming scene must have had on its audience in 1943. Most Americans would not have experienced a Thanksgiving of such abundance (and in such a beautiful setting) during the years of the Great Depression leading up to WWII. In addition, many American families had close friends and relatives away at war and rationing was in full effect by this time. This happy American family sitting around the abundant table was a fantasy. Rockwell was well aware of this. “I paint life as I would like it to be” he stated. [1] And he, like many Americans at the time, envisioned a post-war America through a nostalgic lens. Later in his career, Rockwell would become a bit more political and realist in his work, and thus more controversial. But for most people he remains the artist who painted life as it used to be, even though it never really was.
Here’s a link to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts : http://www.nrm.org/
[1] Wright, Tricia (2007). "The Depression and World War II". American Art and Artists. HarperCollins Publishers
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