American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon

Author:Deborah Solomon [Solomon, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Artist, Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Norman Rockwell, Retail
ISBN: 9780374113094
Google: wdZOAQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0374113092
Barnesnoble: 0374113092
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

Christmas Homecoming, the defining image of holiday togetherness, appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on December 25, 1948.

Grandma Moses had her heartbreaks, too. In February, just six months after she had her cameo in the Christmas Homecoming cover, her son Hugh suffered a fatal heart attack. He was forty-nine years old. Although Grandma had been on the cover of the Post, in that picture showing a strapping boy coming home for Christmas, in real life, Hugh would never come home again.20

* * *

At the end of December Mary Rockwell left Vermont to join her husband in California. She made the trip by train, and was accompanied by eleven-year-old Peter, who was well aware that his mother had promised to stop drinking. But soon after they were on their way, Peter took a walk through the train and returned to the Pullman car he was sharing with his mother to find her lying unconscious on the bed. Strangers were fluttering around her, speaking in grave tones. It seems she had passed out from drinking. Later, going over the incident countless times with each other, her children suspected it was brought on as much by the strain of their father’s absence as their mother’s nervousness about rejoining him in California.

The Rockwells remained in California for another eight months, eventually moving out of their suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and into a house they rented in the Hollywood Hills. Despite the balmy weather and lush scenery, little about their lives seemed to change. During her months in California, Mary haunted bookshops, continued drinking, and wrecked a Buick in an accident downtown.21 And Rockwell became inseparable from a new, much-younger best friend—Joseph A. Mugnaini (pronounced moo-NI-ni), a handsome, Italian-born artist who taught life drawing at Otis and later became the primary illustrator for Ray Bradbury’s novels. Rockwell started spending most of his time with him. He mentored Mugnaini as he had once mentored Fred Hildebrandt and other male artists, loving them less for themselves, perhaps, than for the caring feelings they stirred in him.

Mugnaini makes a cameo appearance in Rockwell’s painting Traffic Conditions,22 an operatic scene triggered by a simple incident. An obstructive white bulldog plants himself in the middle of a narrow alleyway, blocking a moving van and attracting a crowd of onlookers. Mugnaini posed for the mustachioed artist who leans out of a second-story window, pointing emphatically at the little dog. Some thirty Otis students and faculty members modeled for the picture, but Mugnaini was the one who Rockwell hoped would be given a shout-out in the Post. As he wrote to his editors: “Could you possibly mention his name? He is having a one-man show here this summer and it would mean a lot to him.”23

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