Sunday, August 12, 2018

Norman Rockwell


The New-York Historical Society is currently hosting a "Four Freedoms" Norman Rockwell exhibit.  

It's running until September 2 so there is still time to catch it, 

and I recommend that you do.  

It's so odd to see images that I am so familiar with from photos in their original form - oils on canvas. 

His work is so incredibly detailed.  

They had a couple of alternative versions of Freedom of Speech on display.  This one is from The Met, where strangely I have never seen it on display.  

You can see that in the final version he simplified the background to increase the focus on the speaker - a wise decision.  

Toward the end of his career he left the frothy images of his Saturday Evening Post covers behind 

and moved to Look magazine where he focused on illustrations for articles about more important topics like civil rights.  

I have never seen this image - "Murder in Mississippi" before.  Can you imagine anything that looks less like a Norman Rockwell painting?

Cheers!
PJ

(c) 2018 PJ Lehrer
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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