Friday, April 23, 2010

Rockwell Center Essays

The Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies was recently created as an outreach of the Norman Rockwell Museum to lend scholarly insight to imagery in the popular culture.

Curator Joyce Schiller has written a series of essays that analyze various images, including one of Rockwell’s April Fool’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post.

Rockwell painted this 11-inch-square image in 1943 with 45 deliberate errors as a response to the finicky letters he received from fans. That didn’t stop the letters from coming; Rockwell commented that he received a letter from South America noting 184 mistakes.

The RockwellCenter.org
website has other picture-related essays, including:
Dinosaur Parade
The Child, A Calendar
A Hungry Bear
Illustrating an Artist-type

The website also presents the mission of projectNORMAN, the new collecting strategies, the scholar’s program, and an image gallery.

Previously on GJ: The Rockwell Center announcement.

10 comments:

Unknown said...

That is awesome. This image was one of my favorites as a kid. I will be teaching a comics class to teens at the Rockwell this summer!

Steven said...

Thanks for yet another informative and helpful link / post. Woot!

AscenderRisesAbove said...

oh that is very fun. my uncle had rockwell prints in his house and was perhaps what first sparked my interest in art.
ascenderrisesabove(dot)com

andrew said...

The cow studies from the last post are very inspiring....as is all your work.

Anonymous said...

I can't believe: this painting is less than 3 by 4 inches large...?

James Gurney said...

Tino, I think it's 11 x 11, not 11 square inches. That would be incredible.

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David Still said...

This sounds like a very interesting project. The ideas of illustration being just as much a part of culture as any form of 'high' art, and that the impact of illustration on the more general culture resonate very well with my own thoughts on the subject. After reading a few of the pages on the site, I'm still not really sure if this is something that will be made available to the public, on the internet, or if it's more for scholars and students. Still, a very good initiative, and I hope something great comes out of it.

Joyce said...

Thanks to Jim for bringing the Rockwell Center up for discussion, www.rockwell-center.org.
One of the goals of the Center is to bring new scholarly attention to American illustration art. At the same time, I am happy to note, that the general public interested in illustration art is lokking at and reading about illustration art on the Center's web site. As far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier.

Joyce said...

Well, I'm lokking to look!
Joyce