Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms

by Stuart Murray

Book Overview

This book tells the fascinating story of the creation and response to Rockwell's Four Freedoms. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0936399422
• ISBN13: 9780936399423
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Berkshire House Publishers
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 8.0" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Rockwell's four great paintings (the whole story) and four inspiring essays

Nearly every Norman Rockwell coffee table book includes his famous "Four Freedoms" paintings. Most tell the basic story behind the works -- how the artist was inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt's State of the Union speech of 1941, how he sought without success to find sponsorship by a government agency, and how the paintings were originally published in four issues of Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943. This generously illustrated volume by Stuart Murray and James McCabe tells a much more complete -- and much more fascinating -- story. The two authors begin with President Roosevelt and the genesis of the Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter. They trace the creative process that resulted in Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech," "Freedom of Worship," "Freedom from Want," and "Freedom from Fear." Beyond the paintings themselves, Murray and McCabe break new ground. They describe in detail how the paintings were published (first in the magazine and then by the Office of War Information) and how they toured the nation. The first exhibition was in Hecht's Department Store in Washington, with Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas speaking. The paintings and posters sold many war bonds, and the two authors well describe the organization and spirit of wartime bond marketing. Looking beyond the artist, Murray and McCabe describe the enthusiastic reception of the paintings by the American public, quoting reviews, commentaries, and letters written by ordinary Americans. Rockwell had correctly sensed that Americans wanted more than words to understand the war aims of the United States and the United Nations. His great gift to the American people was to first visualize the rich ideals that President Roosevelt had described, and then to render them on canvas in an accessible way. This book has valuable appendices. It is the only volume I have seen that includes the essays and stories that accompanied the paintings in four issues of the Saturday Evening Post. They complemented the paintings, and although they bear the marks of their decade, they are still powerful. In the short story ("parable") that accompanied "Freedom of Speech," Booth Tarkington imagined that the young artist Adolph Hitler and the young journalist Benito Mussolini met "in a small chalet on the mountain road from Verona to Innsbruck." In a conversation they admitted their will to power, and the need for a "purge." Tarkington well understood fascism. Stephen Vincent Benet's essay on "Freedom from Fear" traced the increasing connectedness of the world's nations (what we now call "globalization," evident even then) and how it can strengthen or weaken human freedoms. He portrayed the halting, slow, and difficult advance of freedom in the face of fear, signified in 1943 by aerial bombardment. The essay by Carlos Bulosan -- an immigrant from the Philippines, then an itinerant worker on the West Coast who had to be tracked down by the Post's editors --