Norman Rockwell‘s art, with its quaint visions of small-town America, is today widely considered to be a force of conservatism, a call for things to remain the same even as everything changes. But according to the artist’s granddaughter, everyone has his art all wrong.
“Norman Rockwell was antifa,” Daisy Rockwell told the Bulwark this week, for an article called “The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell.”
That headline is a reference to the Department of Homeland Security’s posts featuring Rockwell’s art over the summer. “Protect our American way of life,” read DHS’s caption, which accompanied a cropped version of Rockwell’s 1971 painting Salute the Flag, in which a crowd of white men, women, and children gaze admiringly at a tasseled American flag.
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Quoting President Calvin Coolidge, known for his small-government conservatism, DHS also posted an edited version of Rockwell’s 1946 painting Working on the Statue of Liberty, in which a multiracial cast of workers can be seen tending to Lady Liberty’s torch. DHS urged readers to “protect your homeland” and “defend your culture.”
The Rockwell family has already publicly rebutted these two posts, along with a third that featured his art. In a USA Today op-ed, the family wrote, “If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see… that his own work has been marshaled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”
Yet the Bulwark article includes an even more explicit response from Daisy Rockwell. “They used [the paintings] . . . as though his work aligned with their values, i.e., promoting this segregationist vision of America,” she said. “And so of course we were upset by this, because Norman Rockwell was really very clearly anti-segregationist.”
The Bulwark article points out that Rockwell did directly address segregation. “I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” he once said. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”
Whether he was antifa, in the sense of the left-wing Antifa movement that President Donald Trump recently declared a terrorist group or more broadly anti-fascist, is less certain, though he did make works about the fight against fascism abroad during World War II. He also did not always accede to conservative interests. He declined to paint a poster for the Marine Corps during the war in Vietnam, saying, “I just can’t paint a picture unless I have my heart in it.”
