FREE

This lecture by Jennifer A. Greenhill, Assistant Professor of Art History, American Art, University of Illinois explores a pivotal moment in Norman Rockwell’s career – the early 1940s – when his imagery became associated, more than ever before, with cherished American values. Although Rockwell’s work had graced the cover of the middle-class weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, since 1916, he only became the magazine’s lead artist in the early 1940s when he became a bigger presence in the public consciousness, partially as a result of the Treasury Department’s use of his Four Freedoms to stimulate the sale of war bonds. But something else happened in these years to reinforce Rockwell’s rise in stature: the illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, who had been at the Post since 1899 and had designed some of its most memorable covers, was fired from the journal. This lecture contrasts Rockwell’s and Leyendecker’s approaches to picturing American culture and demonstrates why Rockwell’s visual idiom took over as the popular language of life on the Home Front.