Thanksgivingの絵といえば

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (2013/11/05) Deborah Solomon 商品詳細を見る

ノーマンロックウェルの伝記が11月初旬に発売されたようですが、NewshourはThanksgivingに週まで紹介はとっておいたのでしょうか。あの絵が"Freedom from Want"っていうタイトルなんですね。And I think that he kind of captures both an American tradition and the fact that Americans can laugh at their own traditions.とこの絵を説明されていますが、パロディ的な要素があるとは思いませんでした。



JEFFREY BROWN: Let me ask you about one specific work of art, one of the most famous, right, "Freedom from Want," a famous Thanksgiving painting.
DEBORAH SOLOMON: Right. That is absolutely my favorite Rockwell.
JEFFREY BROWN: Your favorite? Why? Why?
DEBORAH SOLOMON: Well, absolutely. Absolutely, it's my favorite -- well, for many reasons.
One is that traditional portrayals of Thanksgiving tend to have people giving thanks at a table. And at Rockwell's table, no one is giving thanks. Everybody is kind of talking and animated and not looking at the old couple who are valiantly carrying in this humongous turkey to the table.
And I think that he kind of captures both an American tradition and the fact that Americans can laugh at their own traditions.
JEFFREY BROWN: Really?
DEBORAH SOLOMON: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: So there's more to it than just saying, here's the American table?
DEBORAH SOLOMON: Exactly. It's not a pious image. It captures some of the laughter that does take place in the midst of our most sacred rituals.

この話の後でAmerican Mirrorというのがロックウェルがアメリカの日常を反映したのではなく、理想のアメリカを描いたものだという意味で少し括弧付きの使い方を込めているようです。オックスフォードはI paint life as I would like it to be.というロックウェルの言葉を紹介しています。本人もその点を自覚していたのではないでしょうか。

（ロングマン）
Rockwell, Norman
(1894-1978) a US artist famous for his pictures which appeared on the cover of 'The Saturday Evening Post.' His pictures often show children and families in ordinary places such as at home, in the countryside, or in small shops.

（オックスフォード）
Norman Rockwell
(1894–1978)
a US magazine artist who drew over 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1963. His pictures, done in a realistic style, were full of warmth and humour and very popular with most Americans. They showed people in small towns and in the country engaged in ordinary activities at home and at work.

I paint life as I would like it to be.
Norman Rockwell




（ウィキペディア）
Freedom from Want or The Thanksgiving Picture is one of Four Freedoms paintings by Norman Rockwell that were inspired by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the State of the Union Address, known as Four Freedoms, he delivered to the 77th United States Congress on January 6, 1941.[1] The other paintings in this series were Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Fear, and Freedom of Worship. Unlike the other freedoms, Freedom from Want was not a commonly understood and accepted universal freedom before its presentation.

Freedom from Want was published in the March 6, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post with a corresponding essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the Four Freedoms series.[2] The painting was included as the cover image of the 1946 book Norman Rockwell, Illustrator, written when Rockwell was "at the height of his fame as America's most popular illustrator."[3] Although the image was popular in the United States it caused resentment in Europe where the masses were enduring hardship at the time. Drawing comparisons to John Steinbeck, Bulosan's essay spoke on behalf of those enduring the socioeconomic hardships domestically rather than those enduring sociopolitical hardships abroad, and it thrust him into prominence.

この伝記は、ロックウェルのDarker Sideを描いているようです。ニューズアワーでも触れていましたが、homosexualの傾向については取り上げていませんでしたね。

BOOKS OF THE TIMES
One Complicated Life, Illustrated
‘American Mirror,’ About Norman Rockwell, by Deborah Solomon
By JOHN WILMERDING
Published: October 31, 2013

Most important, we learn of Rockwell’s darker side. The life revealed here is one of anxiety, depression and loneliness, with feelings of failure, neglect and inadequacy. Other adjectives describe Rockwell as unanchored, repressed and loveless. He was a person of “complicated proclivities” and “extreme dependencies,” Ms. Solomon writes. One of them was a lifelong reliance on doctors (a frequent image in his art) because of hypochondria, and later regular visits to psychiatrists, most notably the Freud follower Erik Erikson, who became both counselor and friend.

Rockwell married three times, fathering three sons, but the marriages are characterized as alternatively unhappy, dysfunctional or not sexual. He favored the company of schoolboys as models and younger male artists as friends. One later exception was a friendship with the folk painter Grandma Moses, sufficiently older not to be a threatening female presence. Few girls posed for or appeared as convincingly in his compositions.
Was he a repressed homosexual? We don’t really know. Ms. Solomon points to the homoerotic undertones in early paintings like “Sailor Dreaming of a Girlfriend” (1919), as well as two from 1958, “Before the Shot,” with its bare behind of an innocent young boy at the doctor’s office, and “The Runaway,” showing a beefy policeman seated next to a boy at a cafeteria counter. She uses the phrase “romantic crush” to describe Rockwell’s admiration for his fellow illustrator, J. C. Leyendecker, creator of the Arrow Collar Man. Rockwell once admitted, “Sex appeal seems to be something I just can’t catch on a piece of canvas.”

ニューヨークタイムズの書評は芸術的な再評価とゲイの疑惑にトピックが絞られていたので、普通の英語学習者にはロックウェルの概要を紹介しているWSJの書評の方が参考になります。

Book Review: 'American Mirror' by Deborah Solomon
Norman Rockwell painted our beautiful, bountiful, self-perfecting nation as he knew it could be.
By JONATHAN LOPEZ
Updated Nov. 8, 2013 5:23 p.m. ET

いやいやNewsHourやNYTのトピックをもっと詳しく知りたいという方はSlateの書評がオススメできます。I paint life as I would like it to be.って表現を悪意を込めて表すとthe sugar coating that sweetened the bitter pillとなっちゃうんですね（苦笑）

Mi Gosh and By-heck
Deborah Solomon’s life of Norman Rockwell, whose art looked back to an America that never was.
By Ben Davis

In 1972, Ramparts, the San Francisco journal that had been one of the key outlets for the 1960s New Left, published a barbed little takedown of Norman Rockwell. Titled “Capitalist Realism,” the item was occasioned by a touring career retrospective of Rockwell’s work:

His later work contains attempts at a greater “relevance”: but his is one world where nothing has really changed. Rockwell is Rockwell, possibly the only one who sincerely believes in his vision of things. This retrospective is vintage nostalgia. It holds up a mirror to America: not the America that was, or the America that should have been, but the sugar coating that sweetened the bitter pill.

Ramparts’ venomous assessment is well-turned but unremarkable—Norman Rockwell was, after all, a representative of the “culture” against which the “counterculture” pitted itself. The funny thing is that five years earlier, the venerated American illustrator had assented to do a cover for the outspokenly lefty magazine, offering a double portrait of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell for the May 1967 issue (which also contained Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam.”) Evidently, by this time, the Rockwell legend was so overpowering that it was impossible to see through, even by those who might have had a reason to.

The Ramparts review uses the metaphor of the mirror, and American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell happens to be the title of Deborah Solomon’s robust new biography. Like the author of “Capitalist Realism,” Solomon is aware that Rockwell didn’t “mirror” American life in any true way; his work was, if anything, a kind of funhouse mirror in reverse, turning a world that was really full of strange bumps and twists into something eerily becalmed and normal-looking. “Rockwell Land is its own universe, freestanding and totally distinct,” Solomon admits at the outset. We think of his work as of the past now, but even in its own time it was out-of-time: Already in 1936, his editor at the Republican, anti-New Deal Saturday Evening Post was fuming to Rockwell that the subject of his illustration The Ticket Agent, a glum, bony man trapped behind the cage of a window at a small-town train station, came off as too provincial: “We feel it would be more typical of millions of our citizens if he worked in a town of between ten and fifty thousand inhabitants and not such ‘Mi gosh’ and ‘by-heck’ surroundings.”

ロックウェルの絵は好きなので、この伝記は年末の読書リストに入れたいと思います。