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No Use. The U.S. Government was not smart enough to go to the most popular U.S. artist for propaganda purposes. Rockwell had to go to the Government. One morning not long after Roosevelt and Churchill thought up the subject of a lifetime for him—the Four Freedoms—Rockwell woke with a start at 3, full of ideas. He managed to stay in bed till 5; then he was up and busy with sketches. He called in Neighbor Carl Hess; Hess stood for the shy, brave young workman of Freedom of Speech. A Mrs. Harrington became the devout old woman in Freedom of Worship. A Jim Martin appears in all four posters. All told, the job took seven months.
When Rockwell went to Washington with his sketches, "no one could use them." He promptly "took them back to my beloved Post"—and the Government, thinking it over, has printed, to date, some four million copies. Rockwell has had a good many letters about them. Most of the adverse criticism has pointed out that one particular religion (or another—always that particular critic's) was not strongly enough plugged. Some critics have objected that the sitters are not aristocratic enough; one letter flatly comments on the "common-looking" individuals portrayed. Rockwell himself says: "I put everything I had into them, but they could all stand more work." He wants especially to rework Freedom of Worship and Freedom from Want. The latter is perhaps weakest: Rockwell's acquaintance with want is decidedly impersonal.
"Stick to Your Field." Rockwell has hardly ever tried "straight" painting. Friends used to urge him to, and he did a little during the half year before the '29 crash. The results, he feels, were miserable. "Painting is certainly a higher art than illustrating, but if you are an illustrator, you'd better stick to your field."
Rockwell's tastes in past and present art are entirely what his work would lead one to expect. He venerates Rembrandt and Breughel. He feels the normal awe for Michelangelo, but explains, "Michelangelo is not my star. If I could own an original, I'd rather own a fine Howard Pyle." Among his favorite contemporaries are Thomas Benton, John Steuart Curry, the late Grant Wood. He says "you can learn a tremendous lot from the abstractionists and so forth." But he adds that his own feeling for art is remote from the modernists'—"I like to please people and they don't. I just can't do their kind of work."
*Subject: one kid disconsolately shoving a baby carriage; other kids, jeering, dressed for baseball.