[S]TOCKBRIDGE, Mass. — The tour guide at the Norman Rockwell Museum is pointing to the iconic painting of an everyman standing up and speaking out at town meeting.
“Freedom of Speech,” she says.
And the equally famous one of a family circling a Thanksgiving feast.
“Freedom from Want,” she says.
And a mother and father tucking their children into bed.
“Freedom from Fear,” she says.
And people young and old, black and white, with hands in prayer.
“Freedom of Worship,” she says.
The canvases known collectively as the “Four Freedoms” are all-American — yet also the singular product of the Vermont town of Arlington. Rockwell, who was living there when he listened to President Franklin D. Roosevelt list the freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union address, went on to depict them in a World War II series of Saturday Evening Post illustrations created in his Green Mountain studio.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the artwork, which helped sell 3 million magazines, 2.5 million posters and $132 million worth of war bonds. In commemoration, the paintings are set to tour the world as part of a major traveling exhibition, “Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms.”
That’s good news for the Norman Rockwell Museum, which aims to preserve and promote the artist’s work through its collection of nearly 1,000 paintings and drawings. But it may not be as welcome for New Englanders accustomed to seeing the canvases in their native setting.
Want to eye the original “Four Freedoms” in their 3-foot-by-4-foot frames? You have until the end of the month or will have to settle for reproductions until the tour ends in 2020.
Stockbridge, Mass., is celebrated as Rockwell’s home because of the museum and the fact many longtime locals still remember their onetime neighbor, who died in 1978. But before moving to the Berkshires, the artist lived and worked 70 miles north in Bennington County from 1939 to 1953.
Rockwell was painting covers for the Saturday Evening Post — once the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America — when he heard Roosevelt’s 1941 speech.
“The language was so noble, platitudinous really,” the artist recalled in his autobiography. “How am I to illustrate that?”
Then Rockwell remembered the man who stood up at Arlington’s town meeting and expressed an opinion different from everyone else’s.
“My gosh, I thought, that’s it,” the artist went on to write. “I’ll illustrate the Four Freedoms using my Vermont neighbors as models. I’ll express the ideas in simple, everyday scenes.”
Rockwell spent six months creating the suite, greeted by the public in 1943 “with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than any other paintings in the history of American art,” The New Yorker would report.
Rockwell’s work, often viewed as old-fashioned in the initial decades after his death, is receiving newfound attention as many Americans, feeling economic, cultural and racial strife, yearn for stability.
“Wherever Rockwell’s work is shown, people always think he represents their community,” museum director Laurie Norton Moffatt says. “That is why he is equally at home in New England, the Midwest, South and West — and even internationally when his work has been shared abroad.”
The “Four Freedoms” will be on display in Stockbridge through April, then move to the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan, the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, the George Washington University Museum in the nation’s capital, Mémorial de Caen in Normandy, France (for the 75th anniversary of D-Day), the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Denver Art Museum in Colorado before returning home in the fall of 2020.
“Can these paintings once again remind us of what it means to be American — to be generous, inclusive, kind, respectful, forgiving, nurturing, brave and virtuous?” Moffatt asks. “It is my hope that Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms and his powerful artworks advocating for generosity and equality will once again inspire people to join in common cause for greater public good.”
