Lucas and Spielberg's Norman Rockwell collections show at Smithsonian
Selections from The filmmakers discuss the painter's influence in 'Telling Stories'
Early on in Steven Spielberg's 1987 "Empire of the Sun," before the Japanese invasion of Shanghai shatters the privileged world of the movie's young British hero, we see the boy in the comfort of his own bedroom. In the dim room, the mother's face glows as she tucks her son into bed, while the father, reading glasses and newspaper in hand, walks into the room and for a moment leans over both of them.
The scene looks as though it's straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. And it is just that, according to Spielberg. "I based the scene of the parents tucking Jim into bed on Rockwell's 'Freedom From Fear,'" he says, adding that the page that Jim carries with him into the internment camp was a replica of the painting. "I think his 'Freedom' series best represent these ideals of family, home, community."
"Telling Stories" has 57 works in all, primarily paintings, drawn exclusively from the holdings of the two filmmakers and longtime friends. The idea for the show grew out of a conversation that Spielberg had a couple years ago with art consultant Barbara Guggenheim, in which he suggested that he and Lucas owned enough paintings for a serious show.
"Here's the problem," Guggenheim remembers telling Spielberg. "What the world doesn't need now is just another Rockwell show. But what if it's not just about Rockwell, but about how two of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century connect to one of the greatest storytellers of the early 20th century?"
When she brought the idea two years ago to Elizabeth Broun, director of the American Art Museum, Guggenheim says, she had the pitch down to three words. "I called her up and said, 'Spielberg, Lucas, Rockwell,' and she said 'yes' almost that fast."
So the exhibition has three subjects in a way, exploring their various connections through catalog essays as well as video interviews with the filmmakers.
"There's a different lens for looking at Rockwell because of how George and Steven see their pictures," says the show's curator, Virginia Mecklenburg. "They are both drawn to Rockwell's stories — the way an entire narrative unfolds because of how he crafts a single frame."
Lucas' first purchase, following the success of "Star Wars," was "Boy and Father: Baseball Dispute," the spring entry in Rockwell's 1962 Four Seasons Calendar. One of the most all-American images of many all-American works in the show, it captures a tense moment between a father and his son, who wears umpire gear and points to home plate defiantly. It's easy to imagine the disputed call that came before it.
Spielberg's first Rockwell, also in the show, was "And Daniel Boone Comes to Life on the Underwood Portable," a 1923 advertisement for the typewriter company that tells a story about a story: a studious-looking, clean-cut boy sits at his typewriter with a thought-bubble device above revealing his dramatic vision of the rugged frontiersman.
The March 17, 1956, cover of the Saturday Evening Post, this painting shows a prim schoolteacher caught off guard in front of her class after they've written "surprise" and "happy birthday" on her chalkboard. (While Spielberg owns the oil, Lucas owns the large-scale pencil version of this painting, and the Smithsonian show brings both together.)
"When my kids were younger, they would bring friends over to play, and they would be stopped in their tracks by that painting," Spielberg says. "Nobody was stopped by the Monet, but that's the one that arrests everyone's attention."
"For me, the interest is mythological," says Lucas, who first majored in anthropology when he couldn't study illustration in college. "There's the myth of patriotism, the myth of religion, the myth of America as a wonderful, bucolic place where everyone is created equally and good people succeed. Rockwell taps into our best aspirations for ourselves."
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