Artists in Their Studios

Artists in Their Studios offers a unique glimpse at the lives and studio spaces of more than seventy-five important American artists from the late nineteenth century to today. Rarely seen photographs and primary source materials including letters, artists’ handwritten notes, and personal effects from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art are featured in this compelling exhibition, which offers an intimate perspective on artists at work, at home and abroad. Photographs of Alexander Calder, William Merritt Chase, Chuck Close, Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Wesley Dow, Marcel Duchamp, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Reginald Marsh, Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, John Singer Sargent, John Sloane, David Smith, Andy Warhol, N.C. Wyeth and others will be on view.

A Day in the Life:
Norman Rockwell’s Stockbridge Studio

During his career, Norman Rockwell occupied approximately seventeen studios and borrowed at least six while away from home. All were arranged in a similar manner. Unlike the stereotypical disheveled artist’s studio, Rockwell’s were always neat and organized. His creativity and prolific production seemed to depend on a physical environment of tidy organization.

In celebration of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s 40th anniversary, this refreshed installation of the workspace that Rockwell considered his “best studio yet” invites viewers to enter into a day in his profoundly busy work life, and to ponder the aesthetic and practical concerns that informed the artist’s imagery and experience.

American Chronicles:
The Art of Norman Rockwell

Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, this national traveling exhibition of original art from the Museum’s noted collections returns to Stockbridge for the summer of our 40th anniversary year. The exhibition chronicles Rockwell’s life and art, introducing new scholarship rooted in decades of study by Curator of Norman Rockwell Collections, Linda Pero. The artist’s paintings, drawings, and studies span 56 years, from his 1914 interpretation of American folk hero Daniel Boone securing safe passage for settlers to the American West, to his 1970 report on American tourists and armed Israeli soldiers witnessing a Christmas Eve ceremony at the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. We invite viewers to compare their own 20th-century American experience with the events portrayed by Rockwell, and to consider how much Rockwell’s vision may have influenced theirs.

Rockwell called himself a reporter of contemporary America and current events. The media gave him various labels: 'the people’s painter," "a contemporary Currier & Ives," and "the Dickens of the paintbrush." Norman Rockwell’s hopeful and admiring attitude about humanity was the hallmark of his work. Above all, he loved to paint pictures that conveyed stories about people, their attitude toward each other, and his feelings about them. In 1943, a Time reporter said, "He constantly achieves that compromise between a love of realism and the tendency to idealize, which is one of the most deeply ingrained characteristics of the American people." The more famous he became, the more confident were his self-effacing responses to that fame. In 1952, when Newsweek asked him how much he was paid for a Post cover, Rockwell replied, "Twice as much as it’s worth.” In 1977, Rockwell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for having portrayed “the American scene with unrivalled freshness and clarity,” and with “insight, optimism, and good humor."

Stone's Throw: Peter Rockwell, Sculptor

As a young man, Peter Rockwell had no interest in pursuing a career as an artist, and intentionally avoided the arts because they were "too much in the family." A student of English literature at Haverford College, he eventually enrolled in a sculpture class at the prompting of his mother, Mary Rockwell, and "fell head-over-heels in love with it."

Today a noted sculptor and art historian, Peter Rockwell is the youngest son of legendary American illustrator, Norman Rockwell. His vibrant, animated works, inspired by circus acrobats, animals in motion, gargoyles, and monsters are featured in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, The Bridgeport Museum of American Art, and the Norman Rockwell Museum, which holds the largest compilation of his art. A leading scholar of the history of stone carving, he has documented his knowledge in The Art of Stoneworking, his highly-regarded reference guide. An outstanding collection of the artist’s bronze, marble, and limestone sculptures will be on view on our pastoral landscape in celebration of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s fortieth anniversary.

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera

Photography has been a benevolent tool for artists from Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas to David Hockney. And to illustrators, always on the lookout for better ways to meet deadlines, the camera has long been a natural ally. But the thousands of photographs Norman Rockwell created as studies for his iconic images are a case apart. A natural storyteller, Rockwell envisioned his narrative scenarios down to the smallest detail. Yet at the easel he was an absolute literalist who rarely painted directly from his imagination.

Instead, he first brought his ideas to life in studio sessions, staging photographs that are fully realized works of art in their own right. Selecting props and locations, choosing and directing his models, he carefully orchestrated each element of his design for the camera before beginning to paint. Meticulously composed and richly detailed, Norman Rockwell’s study photographs mirror his masterworks in a tangible parallel universe. Photography opened a door to the keenly observed authenticity that defines Norman Rockwell’s art. And for us today it is a revelation to discover that so many of his most memorable characters were, in fact, real people.

Curator and author Ron Schick is the first to undertake a frame-by-frame study of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s newly digitized photography archive, the product of a just-completed two-year “Save America’s Treasures” project that has preserved the artist’s archive of almost 20,000 negatives and made accessible the full range of the artist’s photography. His forthcoming book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, will be published by Little, Brown and Company in 2009.