It makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t George Lucas and Steven Spielberg champion and collect the art of Norman Rockwell? They’ve all shared enviable talents at telling engaging stories about the dreams that make ordinary people heroic. Their stories evoke feelings of nostalgia for an earlier time of innocence—a mythic construction at the heart of many popular narratives of the “American” experience.

Indeed, Lucas and Spielberg have developed substantial collections of Rockwell’s paintings and large-scale preparatory drawings, which senior curator Virginia Mecklenburg organized in a stunning display of almost sixty works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition’s only venue. As Lucas and Spielberg convey in the important twelve-minute interpretive film within the exhibition, they grew up anticipating the arrival of the Saturday Evening Post each week. Their own youthful experiences resonated with Rockwell’s cover images of young boys yearning for adventure or mooning over glamorous pictures of movie stars.

Telling Stories was the first exhibition to examine substantive connections between Rockwell’s art and the movies, and it did so very successfully in several ways. There were two entrances to the exhibition, each emphasizing different cinematic dimensions in Rockwell’s work. One greeted visitors with his dramatic painting, Boy on High Dive, created for a Saturday Evening Post cover in 1947. It shows a young Peter Rockwell, Norman’s son who modeled for the painting, huddled on his knees and cautiously peering over the edge of a twenty-foot diving board that cuts across the picture at a dramatic angle. With exaggerated facial expressions and choice props, Rockwell created this and other illustrations to function as film stills—gesturing toward a larger narrative but expressed concisely for the perpetually distracted readers of modern American print culture. Boy on High Dive is open-ended enough that readers could identify with this image of a youth who begins the struggle for courage to master a major challenge. The painting has hung for many years in Spielberg’s office; he says he lived metaphorically on that diving board for eleven years before taking the plunge to create Schindler’s List.

From this entrance, visitors proceeded into a gallery filled with Rockwell’s paintings that carry cinematic connections, many stemming from his time spent in Hollywood in the early 1930s when he was reaching celebrity status as a popular illustrator. Some of the most entertaining images included a 1930 portrait of Gary Cooper being made up for his performance in The Texan, and Woman at Vanity (1933), showing a stylish young woman preening in front of a mirror, sporting a Macy’s reproduction of a gown worn by Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton (1932).

The other entrance presented what for me is the most fascinating aspect of Rockwell’s working process—his orchestration of images in the mode of a movie director. Visitors were greeted in this entrance gallery with preparatory photographs for two of his most compelling Post covers: Back to Civvies (1945) and The Jury (1959). Beginning in 1937, Rockwell used a camera to assist in composing his pictures. By the time he created his more complex Post covers of the 1940s and 1950s, he was developing elaborate sets where his models would act out scenes under his direction. Hired photographers would shoot images of these sessions, their photographs forming a kind of storyboard for the artist. Using what he felt were the best details from this raw footage, Rockwell would create a large-scale drawing and sometimes several painted sketches before embarking on the final painted image—his “director’s cut.” In this gallery, visitors glimpsed behind the scenes at Rockwell’s construction of Back to Civvies. One preparatory photograph shows the male lead, a returning soldier posing in front of the mirror above his childhood dresser, trying on clothes that are now too tight. Another photograph shows Rockwell himself playing the character he wanted his model to portray. For The Jury, visitors saw Rockwell’s approach to a multi-figured composition. One photograph shows the whole group acting out the scene of a woman juror who holds to her opinion in the face of opposition from the other male jurors. Another photograph shows an interchange between the determined woman and an imploring male juror, with Rockwell in the background hanging a dark drape to stage the scene’s lighting.

From these two entrance galleries at opposite ends of the exhibition, visitors explored interior spaces filled with Rockwell’s paintings and drawings in the collections of Spielberg and Lucas, organized according to themes that appealed to these collectors, including children coming of age, boyhood, human emotion, and nationalism. Many of the images seem inspired by the movies. In Boy Reading Adventure Story (1923), a bespectacled youth hunches over a book in the bottom of the picture. Above him, a fantastical scene, in a circular fade-out format borrowed from silent films, shows the same boy as a knight in armor who rescues a beautiful girl. The Jury calls to mind the dynamic, emotional performance of Henry Fonda as the holdout among eleven other frustrated jurors in the film Twelve Angry Men (1957). In the center of the exhibition space, a short film ran on a loop with interviews of Lucas and Spielberg. The film was a particularly effective interpretive tool, allowing visitors to make connections between these popular movie makers and Rockwell’s imagery. Each conveys how he began collecting the work of Rockwell and how they appreciate his knack for a kind of cinematic storytelling.

With the exhibition’s primary focus on his large-scale paintings and drawings, visitors could appreciate Rockwell’s considerable talent as a painter and draftsman. His effective technique is perhaps most evident in the very large, horizontal format of several paintings intended as literary illustrations. For example, in Let Nothing You Dismay, for a short story in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1941, Rockwell created a beautifully painted composition of a pouting young girl seated on a long Victorian couch. Dressed at her mother’s insistence in a frilly pink party frock, the young girl is a sight for the sore eyes of her father’s sick patient, who watches from the far-right corner of the composition. Beyond illustrating the story with wit and charm, Rockwell demonstrates his mastery of painted textures, from the thick impasto of the girl’s ruffled dress, to the tightly painted pattern of the rug with its evenly textured threads, and the thin application of paint on the couch, which allows the weave of the canvas support to stand in for upholstery. Rockwell’s painting, with its exacting details and broad horizontal format, seems especially filmic, while also adhering to the time-honored tradition of Old Master painting and trompe l’oeil illusionism.

It is this tension in Rockwell’s work—between modern commercial culture and art-historical tradition, between illustration and painting—that I would have liked further emphasized within the exhibition. Rockwell had great anxiety about his commercial success, which he feared tainted his artistic talent and reputation. As Michele Bogart and I have demonstrated, Rockwell was not alone in this anxiety. For example, Rockwell Kent and Aaron Douglas regarded their work in commercial illustration quite separately from what they valued as their independent, fine art production (Michele Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; and Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007, 165–69). As it stands, visitors to Telling Stories were hard pressed to find evidence of this dilemma in Rockwell’s career. Though the context for Rockwell’s work in America’s flourishing print culture is well represented in Mecklenburg’s excellent exhibition catalogue, this commercial context was physically absent in the galleries. Yet, there was ample floor space within the exhibition to accommodate cases with choice examples of the variety of commercial print publications Rockwell illustrated, from Saturday Evening Post covers, to Boy Scouts of America calendar images, to print advertisements, to literary illustrations for popular magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal or Literary Digest. Far from detracting from Rockwell’s original compositions, these print pieces represent a crucial chapter in the story of Rockwell’s production and would have helped visitors recall, or see for the first time, remnants of the print industry that occupied such an important place in American popular culture between the wars and at mid-century. Moreover, having this evidence in the galleries would have given physical form to the moment of Rockwell’s influence, when his popular images circulated in magazines by the millions to newsstands and households nationwide, spurring the imaginations of young Americans like Lucas and Spielberg.

On the day I visited Telling Stories in late September 2010, many visitors were circulating in the galleries. Most were white and many seemed of the age that they might remember leafing through pages of the Saturday Evening Post, recalling Eric Segal’s interrogation of Rockwell’s role in the production of whiteness (Eric J. Segal, “Norman Rockwell and the Fashioning of American Masculinity,” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 (1996): 633–46). Their observations in the comment book, brilliantly located centrally within the exhibition, were touching and suggested the Rockwell exhibition drew folks who might not otherwise have visited the museum. I leave you with some of their observations:

“Wonderful collection. . . . Irresistibly funny, sad and nostalgic—thanks for sharing them with us, your neighbors in everytown USA.”

“Thank you for sharing these treasures—the fact that two such creative men share a love of the same artist is amazing! Our family trip to see the World War II monument turned into a wonderful afternoon of shared memories!”

“I am no great art critic but I have been a fan of Rockwell’s since childhood. He had a way of capturing a moment in time and make it real to everyone who saw it. His art evokes memories of a time of innocence.”

“These are so enjoyable. What’s wrong with idealizing what could be? They’re fun and sweet.”