We Americans have always had something of a love/hate relationship with the idea of tradition. On the one hand, it gives us a sense of community, place, and knowing who we are. We’re fond of things like holiday traditions that not only bring order out of potential chaos but that provide ways of connecting to good memories—those warm fuzzies that have the power to carry even the most senior of citizens back to the days of innocence and wonder.
On the other hand, going back to the earliest American settlers we’ve seen tradition as a stifling element of social, political, or ecclesiastical construction, stubbornly incapable of accommodating the ever-changing variety of human tastes, beliefs, and circumstances. It binds us to practices and assumptions that may no longer be valid. “Go west, young man,” became a tradition largely to escape other traditions.
Art is one of the arenas in which this ambivalence aggressively plays out, and the work of American painter Norman Rockwell is often in the middle of the battlefield. Rockwell was born in 1894 and from an early age wanted to be a painter. In 1912 he became a staff artist for “Boys Life,” the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. His first cover illustration was in 1913 and he quickly rose to be its arts editor. He became a freelance artist shortly thereafter but resumed work with the Scouts in 1924.
More than any other American artist Rockwell was concerned with the viability and maintenance of tradition, and that concern became the animating spirit behind his paintings. His work with the Boy Scouts was traditional art in service of an organization devoted to tradition.
I spent last Saturday morning at the National Scouting Museum in the Dallas suburb of Irving. In addition to it being the museum of the Boy Scouts it also has a permanent art exhibit called “Norman Rockwell and the Art of Scouting.” It’s a large gallery full of original Rockwell oil paintings that pertain in one way or another to the Boy Scouts. Outside of the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts there’s probably no better place to see so much of his original work.
Seeing him in this setting helps you look at Rockwell as the serious artist that he was. That’s an identity sometimes obscured by our familiarity with him via calendars, magazine covers, and just about everything else. Even if you don’t like his subject matter or think that his style is outdated or clichéd, to spend time in this exhibit is to understand him as a major artist of the 20th Century.
The idea of something worthwhile being passed down through generations is central to Rockwell’s work and that quality is abundantly displayed here. It can be something as mundane as how to tie a good knot or how to build a birdhouse but it’s the act of reverently passing along that is the real subject of these paintings. Several scenes also involve younger scouts following in the footsteps of their older brothers, and Rockwell is very good at painting faces that look real and that have a distinct identity and emotion.
There are a couple of other artists in the gallery whose works explore similar themes but there’s a spark in Rockwell’s pieces that is noticeably missing from the others. They seem flat by comparison.
Despite the Modernism with which he was surrounded, Norman Rockwell believed that traditional styles of art could still communicate substantive ideas. When you see his work surrounded not by commercial magazine ads but in a gallery, you realize that he was right.
(This piece was originally published in the September 24, 2015 edition of the Waco Tribune-Herald)
Norman Rockwell, Homecoming Marine, 1945, private collection