Problems . . .
Posted by
KTK
I just, again, came across this image of one of Norman Rockwell’s best-remembered works:
The picture commemorates a real event: the first day of school for Ruby Bridges, the first black student to attend a previously segregated institution in New Orleans, LA, fully 6 years after the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. She was six years old at the time, and spent her first year in school afraid to eat lunch because one of the good white Christians in the community waited for on her way in to the building and threatened to poison her, every single day.
Like much of Rockwell’s work, the picture brings up mixed feelings for me. I think most of the criticisms of Rockwell are accurate: he’s kitschy, clicheic, and saccharine; he brings considerable technique to bear to minor ends, and there’s often something just a little weird about his pictures (in this case, he puts the focus on the little girl by making the federal marshals not just faceless but headless; he carefully shows at least one bare hand of each marshal to emphasize that they are white, but for some reason also gives them all exactly the same posture, making it look like they are doing some kind of drill-team march). Even when he turned to social controversies, as he not rarely did, he managed to schmaltz it up.
Nonetheless, there’s an undeniable power to some of his paintings; you can tell he meant what he said, and felt it as much as he wanted you to feel it. I had forgotten some of the detail of this image; I think I was shocked by it each time I noticed it but then let it slip my mind again each time. Seeing it today, I was shocked again. To anyone even remotely aware of that era, let alone the audience who had seen it unfold in real time, 4 years before this picture was painted, there is no question what the image represented, or what the title of the painting (”The Problem We All Live With”) referred to. The 5 figures, that tiny girl in her white dress, need no explanation or clarification. They were emblematic - so much so that I looked at the picture several times before noticing that it includes the word “Nigger”, unmistakably, on the wall right above the girl’s head. I forget that detail every time I look away from the picture, and am hit by it again every time I look back. That and the freshly-splattered tomato just behind the girl where she walks past the wall bring the violence and hatefulness of the times right into the picture, right home to the viewer, while the images of the marshals only hint at why they were necessary. This was one time that Rockwell couldn’t take a chance on understatement (not that he ever did). Somehow I think that detail elevates the picture, not merely evoking a protective impulse toward the little girl but forcing you to admit that racism was more than just “a problem” or “an issue” - it was rankest ugliness built into the most basic structures of society. (Amazingly, the picture was a cover illustration for Look magazine.)
Though I don’t have much use for him in general, every once in a while I really like Norman Rockwell. This is one of those times.
Hat Tip: Amanda at Pandagon, who reprints the picture in appropriate context.
My favorite Rockwell piece is Let’s Give Him Enough and on Time
Comment 5/20/2007
I’ve always assumed that Rockwell was identifying Ruby Bridges herself as “The Problem We All Live With” — that the title was a dig at those who wrung their hands over the “black problem” or the “Southern problem,” looking for a compromise way out.
Jules Feiffer once wrote a cartoon in which he had a character say he rejected extremists on both sides of the civil rights struggle — those who bombed schools and those who sought to keep them open. Rockwell’s title seems like a similar thing to me.
I’ve always liked Rockwell.
Comment 5/21/2007
I don’t really get that kind of vibe off Rockwell. Could be, though, I suppose.
Comment 5/21/2007
“one of the good white Christians”
Could you give us the name of the child who threatened to poison her and tell us how you know she was a good Christian? Or, is this just another one of your hateful bigoted rants about which you know nothing? Probably the latter.
Comment 5/21/2007
Here’s a datapoint that any discussion of Rockwell’s civil rights art really should take into account:
http://artchive.com/artchive/R/rockwell/rockwell_mississippi.jpg.html
Comment 5/21/2007
That’s an even better one. And you’re right - the title is bitterly ironic, so he could do bitter irony, I guess.
Personal to Brooklynite: Did I tell you that the woman I rented from on the UWS was a good friend of Schwermer’s mother? She attended the memorial for the three of them, I think at the Ethical Union.
Comment 5/21/2007
Huh. No.
I met Schwerner’s wife once. A hell of a woman.
Comment 5/21/2007