Read Online American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Deborah Solomon
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being overdone,” he said in a rare interview that appeared in The Sun in 1913. 2 “The simple reason is that composition involves difficulties which many illustrators prefer to avoid. In painting a girl’s head, they have only one problem to face: to make it as beautiful as possible. In drawing pictures that require composition, it is necessary to practice control and eliminate everything that is superfluous.”
In dismissing the fashion for girls’ heads, Leyendecker was presumably dismissing his fellow illustrators at The Saturday Evening Post. So many covers from that period show bust-length portraits of women with powder-white skin and beet-red color on their cheeks. They peer out from beneath the wide, tilted brims of fashionable hats. Their gaze tends to be dramatic, perhaps in emulation of the new silent film stars. If they are engaged in an activity, it is likely to be one that requires little in the way of physical exertion, such as admiring a dove or a parakeet.
But perhaps the fashion for “girls’ heads,” as Leyendecker called them, was winding down. “People are now demanding pictures that have some larger meaning,” he insisted, “illustrations with an idea behind them and humor whenever possible.”
Both Leyendecker and his artist-brother Frank X. Leyendecker were homosexual and, to shield themselves from discrimination, concealed their sexual identity not only from their readers but from their editors as well. They lived with their father and their sister, Augusta, in a Renaissance-style chateau they had just built on Mt. Tom Road, on the southern edge of New Rochelle. Rockwell often wondered about the lives unfolding behind the iron fence that rimmed their estate. Walking along Mt. Tom Road on evening strolls with his parents, he would pause in front of the house and glance up at the lighted windows, where a figure might slip into view.
Rockwell worshiped Leyendecker’s covers and considered him the single best illustrator in the country. He shared with Leyendecker a love of narrative illustration, as well as an impatience with girls’ heads. But several years would pass before Rockwell befriended Leyendecker. For now he simply watched him from afar. In the morning, walking to his studio, he sometimes noticed the brothers at the New Rochelle train station, on the way to their studios in New York City. There they were, Joe and Frank, emerging from their limousine or standing on the platform in their matching blue blazers and white flannel slacks.
* * *
As much as Leyendecker, the other illustrators who lived in New Rochelle owed their prosperity to the “slicks,” as the new general interest magazines were known. They included Orson Lowell, Edward Penfield (the father of the American poster), and Fred Dana Marsh (the father of the social-realist painter Reginald Marsh). With his tripartite name, Marsh was sometimes confused with Charles Dana Gibson, who was the most famous of all. Gibson was the creator of the ubiquitous Gibson Girl, that fashionable belle with pointy breasts and an hourglass waistline and a tremendous amount of long, wavy hair that is usually pinned up in what was called a pompadour; it can put you in mind of a robin’s nest or swirls of soft ice cream. In her heyday, she was viewed as an icon of female independence, a woman willing to express an opinion or have a drink without parental consent.
The illustrator Charles Dana Gibson specialized in images of busty women with big hair.
Coles Phillips created another female icon: the Fade-Away Girl, a tall figure with shapely legs who derives her singularity from sophisticated visual tricks. Swatches of her dress are cut away, exposing the background of the composition, which in turn becomes an integral part of the dress. Your eye fills in the presumed outlines. The effect is striking, and turns every housewife into a Houdini equipped with the ability to appear, disappear, and reappear in the clean, rectangular
In dismissing the fashion for girls’ heads, Leyendecker was presumably dismissing his fellow illustrators at The Saturday Evening Post. So many covers from that period show bust-length portraits of women with powder-white skin and beet-red color on their cheeks. They peer out from beneath the wide, tilted brims of fashionable hats. Their gaze tends to be dramatic, perhaps in emulation of the new silent film stars. If they are engaged in an activity, it is likely to be one that requires little in the way of physical exertion, such as admiring a dove or a parakeet.
But perhaps the fashion for “girls’ heads,” as Leyendecker called them, was winding down. “People are now demanding pictures that have some larger meaning,” he insisted, “illustrations with an idea behind them and humor whenever possible.”
Both Leyendecker and his artist-brother Frank X. Leyendecker were homosexual and, to shield themselves from discrimination, concealed their sexual identity not only from their readers but from their editors as well. They lived with their father and their sister, Augusta, in a Renaissance-style chateau they had just built on Mt. Tom Road, on the southern edge of New Rochelle. Rockwell often wondered about the lives unfolding behind the iron fence that rimmed their estate. Walking along Mt. Tom Road on evening strolls with his parents, he would pause in front of the house and glance up at the lighted windows, where a figure might slip into view.
Rockwell worshiped Leyendecker’s covers and considered him the single best illustrator in the country. He shared with Leyendecker a love of narrative illustration, as well as an impatience with girls’ heads. But several years would pass before Rockwell befriended Leyendecker. For now he simply watched him from afar. In the morning, walking to his studio, he sometimes noticed the brothers at the New Rochelle train station, on the way to their studios in New York City. There they were, Joe and Frank, emerging from their limousine or standing on the platform in their matching blue blazers and white flannel slacks.
* * *
As much as Leyendecker, the other illustrators who lived in New Rochelle owed their prosperity to the “slicks,” as the new general interest magazines were known. They included Orson Lowell, Edward Penfield (the father of the American poster), and Fred Dana Marsh (the father of the social-realist painter Reginald Marsh). With his tripartite name, Marsh was sometimes confused with Charles Dana Gibson, who was the most famous of all. Gibson was the creator of the ubiquitous Gibson Girl, that fashionable belle with pointy breasts and an hourglass waistline and a tremendous amount of long, wavy hair that is usually pinned up in what was called a pompadour; it can put you in mind of a robin’s nest or swirls of soft ice cream. In her heyday, she was viewed as an icon of female independence, a woman willing to express an opinion or have a drink without parental consent.
The illustrator Charles Dana Gibson specialized in images of busty women with big hair.
Coles Phillips created another female icon: the Fade-Away Girl, a tall figure with shapely legs who derives her singularity from sophisticated visual tricks. Swatches of her dress are cut away, exposing the background of the composition, which in turn becomes an integral part of the dress. Your eye fills in the presumed outlines. The effect is striking, and turns every housewife into a Houdini equipped with the ability to appear, disappear, and reappear in the clean, rectangular
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