NORMAN ROCKWELL & 'THE SATURDAY EVENING POST'

Norman Rockwell's selfportrait

Today, The Grandma has been drawing a little with her friend Tina Picotes. Tina is an artist and she always helps The Grandma with her creations.

The Grandma loves comics and illustrations and she sometimes draws easy illustrations to be relaxed and to have fun.

The Grandma admires many illustrators, the best for her, Hugo Pratt, but today she has been thinking in Norman Rockwell, the great illustrator who worked for The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular American magazines that was published for the first time as a weekly newspaper on a day like today in 1821.

The Saturday Evening Post is one of The Grandma's preferred magazines, with the permission of The New Yorker, and Norman Rockwell one of The Grandma's most admired illustrators.

Before drawing, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 9. Inserting and Deleting Items (I) (Spanish Version)

The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influential magazines for the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached millions of homes every week.

The magazine declined in readership through the 1960s, and in 1969 The Saturday Evening Post folded for two years before being revived as a quarterly publication with an emphasis on medical articles in 1971. The magazine was redesigned in 2013.

The Saturday Evening Post was first published in 1821 in the same printing shop at 53 Market Street where the Pennsylvania Gazette had been published in the 18th century. It grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor George Horace Lorimer (1899–1937).

More information: The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, editorials, human interest pieces, humor, illustrations, a letter column, poetry -with contributions submitted by readers-, single-panel gag cartoons including Hazel by Ted Key and stories by the leading writers of the time. It was known for commissioning lavish illustrations and original works of fiction. Illustrations were featured on the cover and embedded in stories and advertising. Some Post illustrations became popular and continue to be reproduced as posters or prints, especially those by Norman Rockwell.

Curtis Publishing Co. stopped publishing the Post in 1969 after the company lost a landmark defamation suit and was ordered to pay over $3 million in damages.

The Saturday Evening Post Cover, 1925

The Post was revived in 1971 as a limited circulation quarterly publication. As of the late 2000s, The Saturday Evening Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which purchased the magazine in 1982.

In 1916, Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer discovered Norman Rockwell, then an unknown 22-year-old New York artist. Lorimer promptly purchased two illustrations from Rockwell, using them as covers, and commissioned three more drawings.

Rockwell's illustrations of the American family and rural life of a bygone era became icons. During his 50-year career with the Post, Rockwell painted more than 300 covers.

The magazine's line-up of cartoonists included Bob Barnes, Irwin Caplan, Tom Henderson, Al Johns, Clyde Lamb, Jerry Marcus, Frank O'Neal, B. Tobey, Pete Wyma and Bill Yates. The magazine ran Ted Key's cartoon panel series Hazel from 1943 to 1969.

Each issue featured several original short stories and often included an installment of a serial appearing in successive issues. Most of the fiction was written for mainstream tastes by popular writers, but some literary writers were featured. The opening pages of stories featured paintings by the leading magazine illustrators.

More information: The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

The Post published stories and essays by H. E. Bates, Ray Bradbury, Kay Boyle, Agatha Christie, Brian Cleeve, Eleanor Franklin Egan, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Ernest Haycox, Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Gallico, Normand Poirier, Hammond Innes, Louis L'Amour, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph C. Lincoln, John P. Marquand, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Sax Rohmer, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck and Rex Stout and Rob Wagner. It also published poetry by such noted poets as Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker and Hannah Kahn.

Jack London's best-known novel The Call of the Wild was first published, in serialized form, in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903.

Emblematic of the Post's fiction was author Clarence Budington Kelland, who first appeared in 1916–17 with stories of homespun heroes, Efficiency Edgar and Scattergood Baines. Kelland was a steady presence from 1922 until 1961.

For many years William Hazlett Upson contributed a very popular series of short stories about the escapades of Earthworm Tractors salesman Alexander Botts. Publication in the Post launched careers and helped established artists and writers stay afloat. P. G. Wodehouse said the wolf was always at the door until the Post gave him his first break in 1915 by serializing Something New.

The Saturday Evening Post, 1924

After the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Post columnist Garet Garrett became a vocal critic of the New Deal. Garrett accused the Roosevelt Administration of initiating socialist strategies. After Lorimer died, Garrett became editorial writer-in-chief and criticized the Roosevelt Administration's support of the United Kingdom and efforts to prepare to enter what became the Second World War. Garrett's positions aroused controversy and may have cost the Post readers and advertisers.

The Post readership began to decline in the late 1950s and 1960s. In general, the decline of general interest magazines was blamed on television, which competed for advertisers and readers' attention.

The Post had problems retaining readers: the public's taste in fiction was changing, and the Post's conservative politics and values appealed to a declining number of people. Content by popular writers became harder to obtain. Prominent authors drifted away to newer magazines offering more money and status. As a result, the Post published more articles on current events and cut costs by replacing illustrations with photographs for covers and advertisements.

In 1968, Martin Ackerman, a specialist in troubled firms, became president of Curtis after lending it $5 million. Although at first he said there were no plans to shut down the magazine, soon he halved its circulation, purportedly in an attempt to increase the quality of the audience, and then subsequently did shut it down.

More information: The New York Times

At a March 1969 post-mortem on the magazine's closing, Emerson stated that The Post was a damn good vehicle for advertising with competitive renewal rates and readership reports and expressed what The New York Times called understandable bitterness in wishing that all the one-eyed critics will lose their other eye.

In 1970, control of the debilitated Curtis Publishing Company was acquired from the estate of Cyrus Curtis by Indianapolis industrialist Beurt SerVaas. SerVaas relaunched the Post the following year on a quarterly basis as a kind of nostalgia magazine.

In early 1982, ownership of the Post was transferred to the Benjamin Franklin Literary and Medical Society, founded in 1976 by the Post's then-editor, Dr. Corena Cory SerVaas, wife of Beurt SerVaas.

With the January/February 2013 issue, the Post launched a major makeover of the publication including a new cover design and efforts to increase the magazine's profile in response to a general public misbelief that it was no longer in existence. The magazine's new logo is an update of a logo it had used beginning in 1942.

More information: Pinterest

Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894-November 8, 1978) was an American author, painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture.

Norman Rockwell

Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter, The Problem We All Live With, Saying Grace, and the Four Freedoms series. He is also noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life, calendars, and other illustrations. These works include popular images that reflect the Scout Oath and Scout Law such as The Scoutmaster, A Scout is Reverent and A Guiding Hand, among many others.

Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes.

Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate more than 40 books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as painting the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as those of foreign figures, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. His portrait subjects included Judy Garland.

One of his last portraits was of Colonel Sanders in 1973. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976, Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America, were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the Four Seasons illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for 17 years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He painted six images for Coca-Cola advertising. 

More information: Norman Rockwell Museum

Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters -particularly movie promotions-, sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals -including Yankee Doodle Dandy and God Bless the Hills, which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey- rounded out Rockwell's œuvre as an illustrator.

Norman Rockwell & Grandma Moses, 1949

Rockwell's work was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime. Many of his works appear overly sweet in the opinion of modern critics, especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life. This has led to the often-deprecatory adjective, Rockwellesque.  

Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a serious painter by some contemporary artists, who regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch. 

Writer Vladimir Nabokov stated that Rockwell's brilliant technique was put to banal use, and wrote in his book Pnin: That Dalí is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood. He is called an illustrator instead of an artist by some critics, a designation he did not mind, as that was what he called himself.

More information: Artsy

Norman Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894, in New York City, to Jarvis Waring Rockwell and Anne Mary Nancy Rockwell, born Hill.

Rockwell's family moved to New Rochelle, New York, when Norman was 21 years old. They shared a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who worked for The Saturday Evening Post.

With Forsythe's help, Rockwell submitted his first successful cover painting to the Post in 1916, Mother's Day Off (published on May 20). He followed that success with Circus Barker and Strongman (published on June 3), Gramps at the Plate (August 5), Redhead Loves Hatty Perkins (September 16), People in a Theatre Balcony (October 14), and Man Playing Santa (December 9).

Rockwell was published eight times on the Post cover within the first year. Ultimately, Rockwell published 323 original covers for The Saturday Evening Post over 47 years. His Sharp Harmony appeared on the cover of the issue dated September 26, 1936; it depicts a barber and three clients, enjoying an a cappella song. The image was adopted by SPEBSQSA in its promotion of the art.
 

In 1943, during World War II, Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms series, which was completed in seven months and resulted in his losing fifteen pounds. The series was inspired by a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, wherein Roosevelt described and articulated Four Freedoms for universal rights. Rockwell then painted Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship and Freedom from Fear.

Rockwell's last painting for the Post was published in 1963, marking the end of a publishing relationship that had included 321 cover paintings. He spent the next 10 years painting for Look magazine, where his work depicted his interests in civil rights, poverty, and space exploration.

Rockwell died on November 8, 1978, of emphysema at age 84 in his Stockbridge, Massachusetts home. First Lady Rosalynn Carter attended his funeral. 

More information: Artnet

No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations.

He's got to put all his talent and feeling into them!

Norman Rockwell