Keepers of the Flame
Parrish, wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition at the Norman Rockwell Museum
Parrish, wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition at the Norman Rockwell Museum by James D. Balestrieri
If, as the old adage has it, a picture is worth a thousand words, then the 60 works and the 300 or so digital images in Keepers of the Flame: Parrish ,wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition, the new exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum, ought to be worth somewhere between 360,000 and 400,000 words.
The thesis of the exhibition is ambitious in its sweep, arguing that the American tradition in narrative art grows out of the centuries-old link between figurative realism and storytelling in Europe. The show’s curator Dennis Nolan, an artist and professor of illustration at the Hartford Art School at University of Hartford, describes the exhibition in the following way:“telling stories in pictures— whether the vehicle is an altarpiece, a ceiling fresco, a canvas or an illustrated book—transcends the limits of written and spoken language and is the most powerful way to express and comment on our shared experiences and multifaceted lives.the artists represented in this exhibition told their stories with clarity and an expertise that had been nurtured and maintained through the centuries by the artist/ teachers, the keepers of the flame.”
In other words, two tributaries issue from this ancient current of narrativity in Western painting and drawing: the first describes the relationship between the artist and the viewer, where the artist wants the viewer to read, and by reading we mean comprehend—clearly—a story, or a moment in a story, whether we are speaking of a story in the Bible or a moment in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.the presumption here is that the story precedes the work of art, that the story exists a priori to the work of art.art illustrates, and, when it is at its best, illuminates.
The second tributary in the thesis describes a consistency in transmission from teacher to student—since the Quattrocento of Fra Filippo
Lippi and Sandro Botticelli—where the student becomes teacher to the next generation, and so on. Implicit here is an argument for the academy, for
academic art, for drawing from life, for representational art in general.
The current of the exhibition comes to rest on three giants of American narrative art: N.c.wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell.
Wyeth, and, for a time, Parrish, studied under Howard Pyle, founder of the Brandywine School, the crucible of the Golden Age of American illustration. Pyle had little formal training and did not, as many American artists did, study in Europe—he would visit Italy in the last year of his life, and, ironically, die in Florence. He was, however, bolstered by classically trained painters like Edwin Austin Abbey and Frederic Church. Pyle was also a writer; his retellings of classic tales as well as his illustrations for them make him responsible, in large measure, not only for the appearance of Robin Hood, King Arthur and The Pirates of the Caribbean, but also for their place as literary archetypes as we conceive them. This is crucial. In the Crystal Depths is one of a suite of five paintings Wyeth did of single Woodland Indians titled, collectively, The Indian in His Solitude.the Native American depicted in each painting is different from the others; this is not sequential, narrative art. According to Wyeth, Pyle very much admired these works that one of his star pupils produced. But In the Crystal Depths is a painting Pyle could never have imagined, much less painted.the only action is the smooth current as the canoe silently glides with it.the Indian is still, not paddling, looking at his image in the water.the painting itself is constructed of planes of abstraction, intentionally forced perspective, and skeins of bubbles and broken water that cross the border into expressionism. The story, the before and after, the reason for the Indian’s introspection, is elusive and unknowable. this is narrative art without a narrative.
Wyeth would, famously, become the principal artist at Scribner’s, illustrating dozens of works of classic adventure literature. His illustrations for Stevenson’s Treasure Island, for example, will build on and add another layer to Pyle’s image of the swashbuckling buccaneer.the thesis of the exhibition holds as pupil ultimately emulates teacher.
André Malraux wasn’t the first art historian to realize that if artists didn’t believe that their art could add something to art they wouldn’t make art. But he did say that the idea that artists—and here we are speaking of the realist tradition—want to imitate nature doesn’t really tell the whole tale. Church, Malraux would say, doesn’t want to paint a great landscape. He wants to paint a better landscape than his teacher ,thomas Cole. this desire is how individual style develops. artists learn from artists, but only in order to transcend them. By extension, the illustrator tries to exceed the text he or she is illustrating, or the confines of the
“job”—as the old illustrators, a dying breed, still say. they’re artists, after all, and want to make every job their own. Wyeth always worked hard to avoid the obvious high points in the classic works he illustrates, straining against the power of the narrative to find a moment he can call his own. Rockwell’s best work, his covers for The Saturday Evening Post, illustrate nothing beyond the fastidiousness of his photographic reference and its development into a powerful arrangement of elements within the plane of the painting. Girl at Mirror is all the more successful because we do not know exactly what is going through the girl’s mind as she looks at herself in the mirror, having just looked at a photograph of the actress Jane Russell in the magazine on her lap. Is she sad because she doesn’t feel she measures up, or ever will? Is she merely pensive, wondering what adulthood, what womanhood, will be like? Is this a study in innocence and experience, hometown and Hollywood? We don’t know. Despite the fact that the painting belongs to the school of narrative realism, the narrative is ambivalent,
unattached to specific meaning. Conversely, when Rockwell’s subject is Ruby Bridges, the backstory is a known quantity. But Rockwell’s interpretation of it, from the point of view of the little girl trying to go to school, is his alone, standing outside the journalistic and historical moment. Even if, in centuries to come, we forget the history of Brown v. Board of Education and lose the title of the painting, we will be able to say a great deal about it precisely because Rockwell’s shift of the point of view shifts responsibility for the narrative to the viewer.we feel the painting transcending its narrative as it moves from the particular to the universal. Realism, like the theater, is always said to be under siege and in crisis.the forces of modernism and abstraction are always arrayed against it. But realism not only resists, it thrives. If you doubt this, check out the prices achieved at auction by works by Rockwell, Parrish and Wyeth in recent sales and consider how large the crowds will be when George Lucas opens the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. An effective picture’s relationship to words, even when that picture is ostensibly tied to those words, is tenuous. Illustration and narrativity in the visual arts are, by their very nature, imperfect translations—as all translations are.the disparate arts speak in their own unique languages. If they did not, we wouldn’t need so many of them.the collection of artworks in Keepers of the Flame is outstanding precisely because there are as many types of realism as there are artists who consider themselves realists.the flame has been, and is, well kept.