Columbia Museum exhibit captures Rockwell’s use of camera’s eye

PanARMENIAN.Net - In a controversial text on the subject, contemporary British artist David Hockney contends that as far back as the 16th century, painters have utilized optical devices — including the camera obscura and camera lucida — to reproduce a fleeting image. These technologies, including the camera obscura and the camera lucida, were seen as drafting tools, valuable resources during the early stages of the painting process, Dr. Tom Mack said in an article published at Free Times.

When photography came into its own in the 19th century and images could finally be fixed upon paper, photos began to serve a different purpose. They became a way of seeing — providing, as it were, a frame of reference for the painter. The noted French artist Edgar Degas, for example, used stop-action photographs of race horses to capture the various ways jockeys controlled their mounts, later incorporating the details the photographs captured in the paintings that he devoted to life at the race track.

This is also the function that photography played in the career of one of America’s most iconic genre painters, the master illustrator Norman Rockwell. Now on view at the Columbia Museum of Art, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera offers a cleverly arranged overview of one artist’s evolving relationship with technology.

The 50-photograph exhibition — the Columbia Museum of Art is the last stop on its national tour — has been organized so that the visitor can appreciate how Rockwell’s attitude toward the camera shifted over time. At first, he resisted the use of the camera as an aid; he felt that he would be “cheating” by not using the traditional method of basing his final composition on a series of preliminary sketches. He soon discovered, however, that he had to employ professional models to meet the demands of that process, as he could not expect someone off the street to be able to hold a pose for the time required for him to draw his subject.

In essence, as the “Human-Looking Humans” and “Stockbridge” sections of the exhibition make clear, Rockwell’s eventual acceptance of photography as an aid freed him to use real-life people in his work. The camera allowed the artist to make use of his neighbors as subjects, and thus he became more fully integrated into the life of the village, which came to serve as a microcosm of small-town America. One might argue it humanized his illustrations to a degree that would not have been possible if he had not revisited his feelings about the camera.

Visitors, through Jan. 18, will enjoy matching the real-life subjects in the photographs with the figures that eventually appeared in some of the cover paintings that Rockwell produced for The Saturday Evening Post and Look.

Take, for example, a work from 1955 entitled The Marriage License. Early in his career, Rockwell would take very focused photographs of individuals engaged in a specific act, interacting with specific props, and then merge those component parts into a composite image; eventually, however, especially after his move to Stockbridge, Rockwell began to photograph a particular image in its totality, creating for the camera a tableau vivant or a dramatic scene frozen in time.

The setting for The Marriage License, for example, is the actual office of the Stockbridge town clerk, complete with roll-top desk, cuspidor overflowing with cigarette butts and a bank calendar indicating the date. The young couple carefully signing the application were actually engaged in real life; the old gent playing the town clerk was a local stand-in. The photograph differs little from the oil painting displayed next to it, except for certain embellishments that Rockwell felt either balanced the composition (he added a cast-iron stove in the lower left of the image) or added visual interest: He put a cat rubbing its flank against the town clerk’s chair and a potted plant on the window sill. Amid all the meticulously rendered detail in the final composition, the viewer’s eye is drawn to this particular plant’s single red bloom.