Visits to college classrooms, museums, and historic places. Exploring our nations past every weekend on cspan3. I am the director of the George WashingtonUniversity Museum and Textile Museum here on the campus of George Washington university in the heart of washington, d. C. Four freedomss exhibition celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Norman Rockwell museum, the 75th dday, and of putting on the rose the great images Norman Rockwell painted the created a National Concept of the four freedoms that made visible, tangible, and real the ideological concepts president roosevelt expressed in the state of the Union Address in 1941. [newsreel video] pres. Roosevelt the first is freedom of speech and expression anywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship god in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which translated into world terms means economic , understandings which will nation, ar every healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor anywhere in the world. [thundering applause] john what people forget today is that the concept of four freedoms did not take immediate hold on the national psyche. A few artists made images of freedoms, there was talk of freedoms, but it did not capture the imagination in any way people would be excited about until Norman Rockwell. Rockwells four paintings of the freedoms encapsulated, made understandable and tangible the values of each of those freedoms and were arguably the most prominent and Public Images of domestic images of world war ii and unified the nation. The exhibition begins with some early rockwell paintings at the time of the new deal, the depression era, giving a little sense of what america was like prior to world war ii. Then it goes straight into the war years with videos of fdrs four freedoms speech and some reactions to it by other artists trying to encapsulate the four freedoms in art and other images of world war ii, following the introduction of fdrs state of the Union Address of 1941. We look at some of rockwells images. R images that were about the common person joining the military and what military life was like. A more lighthearted approach, and then really the heart of the exhibition is rockwells wrestling with these concept of four freedoms, of trying to come up with the imagery that would capture the ideals in a convincing manner, and then the spread of those images across the United States. First through magazines, then posters, then the war bond drive, and then ultimately leading toward the end of world war ii. The show culminates with some of rockwells great and lesser known works that confront civil rights and reimagine, i think, the values of the nation. Finally, as a coda to the exhibition, the Rockwell Museum organized some 40 artists work to be shown. Work that was done can temporarily, today, work by Living Artists to reflect upon the value of the four freedoms. To think about them and to show a different context on how we might think of them today. Well, lets begin our tour. I would like to show you before we look at the four freedoms i would like to show you the earliest images rockwell made of world war ii. He conceived a character named Willie Gillis, who is actually a 15yearold boy at the time, too young to enlist, but he created a series of images, paintings posthe saturday evening that were a lighthearted look at life in the military, one of his more famous ones is Willie Gillis receiving a care package. You can see he has received a box of goodies and he has made quite a few friends, and the friends have lined up, all looking at his package. It became kind of a lighthearted symbol of the military together, life on the base, training, this kind of thing. It would have been a cover for the saturday evening post. Today, sometimes the images change a little bit subsequent to their publishing on the post. I can show you in this one exactly what i mean. First, it is important for us to know that these images, for rockwell, were valuable as photographs to go on covers of the magazine. The pictures themselves were not intended for museum use, for sale, or these kinds of things as we think about today in the art world. They were images to be photographed and he was paid for the photograph of the image, the cover, and they gave the painting back to him after he did it. So, rockwell retained the picture, and after they had been published later on, sometimes the paintings themselves would have been given away or sold to others. This one, i am pretty sure, was sold to someone else and i can show you why. If you look at the background, and actually look at the hands, this is magnificent painting. This is an artist who has command of his craft and can reproduce the visual imagery in a meticulous manner. Rockwell, his brush and his reproductive skills, were as good as a photograph, sometimes better. If you look back, you see the background gets murky. You look around, and all of a sudden, a great painter like this has sprayed some paint on the sleeve of his image. Rockwell didnt do that. Somebody did it later when they painted the background and took out the lines from the saturday evening post. There are other images of Willie Gillis. This one was never published. Willie, the young recruit, remember, he was too young to for theut posing pictures, the rabbits foot for good luck. Willie gillis, so you know who he is, looking starry eyed and naively as these citizens are eating, smoking, sitting around, the veterans of war. It was actually thought of as a little bit too harsh a contrast and was not published in the saturday evening post. This painting to the side is one of the better Willie Gillis images, one of the more poignant ones. Willie is in a place of worship, with military superiors in front and behind, thinking about what is to come. The painting here, war news, was painted by rockwell late in 1944 and is an image of people in small town america listening to their news, getting their news, from a newspaper and the radio in the back. Its really a magnificent composition in that the artist we know from a sketch that the newspaper was to have on its cover a headline that says, war plans for france. So there was a potential invasion of france being talked about prior to dday on the radio, and the figures here are gathering the news, listening to the news, as you would have, and showing the concern of people at home about the war abroad. This was actually not a cover and was not submitted to the saturday evening post because rockwell considered it too subtle and too hard for people to understand and read. He made another picture about the radio elsewhere in the exhibition. This image, a poster, is the only image that rockwell painted of actual combat taking place. Rockwell was uncomfortable with the concept of eating war in action. That was not really what he did. But he did this one showing the bullets being spent lets give him enough and on time. It was a poster to rally the factory workers, to excite the people on the home front to support the war effort, and this was an image meant to show the bullets are needed. This fighting figure still with all the details of rockwell the realistic imagery and all of this cleverly covers his face so that the fighter is an everyman, an anyman, fighting for the values of the nation. Norman rockwells quest to paint the four freedoms actually began in failure. He made a series of sketches and came to washington, d. C. , and presented them at the office of war information. The leadership at the time rejected the idea and sent him away without a commission to paint roosevelts four freedoms. On his trip home, however, he stopped in philadelphia and met with his editors at the saturday evening post, who embraced the idea and instructed rockwell to go home, not to work on other features, but to focus on the four freedoms. He was given three months to do the four freedoms, and it took him seven to conceive and paint the pictures once he began. The First Painting he worked on, the one that gave him the inspiration for the series, was freedom of speech. As rockwell recalls in his biography, he woke up, he was struggling, as rockwell always did, struggling to come up with a concept. An idea of how he would actually embody an abstract idea such as freedom of speech, and he said, he woke up one night and recalled a meeting in the town of arlington where he lived at the time, a town hall meeting and a debate that took place in arlington about whether or not to rebuild the school that had recently burned down or whether the children would be bussed to the next district and taxes would be saved. He remembered an incident when his neighbor rose to oppose the idea of building the new school, and what he remembered is the rest of the meeting, listening respectfully, hearing the point of view, and then, by the way, the gentleman lost the vote. The town voted to enact the tax and to borrow 80,000 to build the new schoolhouse, so this was a dissenting voice. Rockwell made a series of studies afterwards. He woke up in the morning, very early and started sketching and , creating images. We have some of his sketches showing rockwell wrestling with the various ways that he could articulate this image, this idea of freedom of speech, and what he remembers. Over a series of images, he came with the idea of essentially putting a blackboard in the background, a neutral background, so that the speaker would stand tall amongst a group of people who were listening, holding the annual report of the town the agenda of the meeting, the agenda of the taxes. You see eyes looking. Ears emphasized, because freedom of speech is about the obligation to listen and respectful listening. So, rockwell created this image that showed everyone paying respect and proper attention. Oh, and by the way, that is an image of Norman Rockwell in the far corner, also showing his ears and eyes listening to the speech. Freedom of religion is probably the most difficult image that rockwell had to create, because how often do people of different religions come together in a place of worship . People worship separately, each in their own place of worship, and so rockwell created kind of a composition of humanity together. Of different faiths coming together, all praying to a common god. Each according to the dictates of his own conscious. Freedom from want, rockwell painted during thanksgiving. There are two family members, his mother and his wife, the rest are neighbors and friends that rockwell posed to create an American Family celebrating thanksgiving. Its really a symphony of white, and a masterwork of still life. Water glasses, not the most lavish dutch still life you might see, rather sparse, except for the enormous turkey that is going to be there. The figures gathering here, much like the saints would be gathered in a renaissance painting, on each side, and the centerpiece gathering you , i wouldwith suggest, kind of a divine light looking in through the windows and the beautifullypainted draperies that show white against white, against the white tablecloth, against clear glasses. Showing kind of a spotless, clean, and unmessy table, showing americans coming together to celebrate thanksgiving in good cheer and family unity. A concept worth preserving, worth fighting for. In freedom from fear, we have a mother and father tucking in the two children. The newspaper has bombings, horror, and references. Probably the bombings of london, the london blitz of world war ii. If you look around the edges of this kind of scene of serenity and peace, you look around the edges and you see the doll. A reference possibly to a body of war, and the light in the back, to me, references the kind of orange glow of the fire bomb in the back. So, it is one of the more subtle images that shows the images of horror overseas that references them and shows the threat to the future generations. As i said before, the paintings of rockwell were not the images that americans saw. If you follow me, i can show you that americans would have come to learn about rockwells four through images from the saturday evening post. From february through april, every other week, one of rockwells images appeared with a fullpage spread with an essay by a writer of their interpretation of freedom of speech or freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The saturday evening post circulated to millions of people, so americans would have seen these images, much like americans today might have seen them on a television and would have talked about it in their community. Some of these essays are really quite poignant. The freedom of worship, one of the more difficult, abstract pictures in the series, actually has a magnificent essay by the writer, will durrant. I will just read a couple of passages man differs from the animal in two things, he laughs and he prays, but the mark of a man is that he beats his head against the riddle of life, knows his infinite weakness of body and mind, lifts up his heart to a hidden presence and power, and finds in his faith, a beacon of heartrendering hope, a pillar of strength for his fragile decency. It is wonderful here if our sons and brothers accomplish this by their toil and suffering, they can carry to all mankind the boon and stimulus of an ordered liberty. It will be an achievement the size of which all the triumphs of alexander, caesar, and napoleon will be a little thing. To that purpose, they are offering their youth and their blood. To that purpose and to whom we others, regretting that we cannot stand beside them, dedicate the remainder of our lives. So americans saw these, read about them, and in the following month, april of 1943, there was a war bond drive. So these images, having been rejected initially as sketches by the office of war information, became embraced by the federal war bond drive and the images were adopted as the symbols for the second bond drive. The concept was that americans would invest, pay money for a bond that would mature in a number of years. It was about 18, and in 10 years, the bond would pay you back 25. But the concept was the idea was that they needed the nation to all come together quickly to raise the funds for munitions and to equip the nations soldiers appropriately. [video newsreel] hollywoods most famous movie stars leave the film capital to help the government sell war bonds. Irene dunn, ronald coleman, hedy lamar, greer carlson, all part of a contingent of some 50 screen celebrities giving their time and talents to aid the national war effort. John in the second war bond drive, the four freedoms were adopted as images of the bond drive and there was a Publicity Campaign that went to 17 different cities starting in washington, d. C. And rockwell came to the Department Store in d. C. , and they showed off the posters, and they printed, in the millions, duplicate sets of the four freedoms. A set of four smaller images that were given to you when you bought the bonds. You bought the bonds, you received images of the four freedoms to put in your home. The large posters would have been sent around the country in post offices, schools and elsewhere to rally the nation to buy war bonds so the dissemination of this image in the spring of 1943 was pervasive and was seen as the face of the war effort at that time. Norman rockwell was trained as an illustrator. He studied in the Art Students League in new york, learned the basics of painting and drawing the human body, and mastered his craft essentially with the skill of being able to recreate, in drawings or in paintings, as accurately and realistically as a camera might. Although rockwell said in his autobiography that he sometimes looked at the world is a little too messy and not quite as ideal as he would like it to be, and therefore he made it more ideal , in his paintings. He became extraordinarily well art first his working for the boy scouts and then working for magazines the great one being the saturday evening post. So, as an artist who appeared on the cover of the post, millions of people would see his art, far more than were he an artist that was making paintings for a wealthy patron, or for a museum, say. He was a very popular artist and chronicled American Life from really that teens through the teens, the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, up until the early 1970s. So, where this exhibition begins is kind of in the early 1930s. There is an image here from the saturday evening post cover of returning home from vacation. This is a year after the stock market crash of 1929. Well times were bad, there was a market downturn, it wasnt the depression yet. So rockwell could look at life in still a very lighthearted way. This is the vacation from which you need a vacation. The family has returned home exhausted. A little frog coming out of the childs box, the hastily packed suitcase, the camera, shoes untied, wornout, with signs about a wonderful vacation. It is something Many Americans could relate to, could see a little bit of their own lives on the cover of the saturday evening post, which made the magazine such a welcoming when the mail arrived and the post was delivered. People would see something they could relate to at the time. Next to this picture is another painting of a vacation from 1938, but it is quite different. Posters of vacations, exotic ports of call, paris, mountains, vacations. Now, six years into the depression, a salesperson with no customers, board, unsuccessful. This was the ravages of the vacations of the depression. Unemployment was spreading throughout the nation. A vacation meant something different. Remember that painting i showed you of the gentlemen around the lunch counter that were listening to the radio . Following that painting rockwell painted this a gentleman bytening to the radio, himself in his home, trying to hear the news. It is a much more personal image than the gentleman at the lunch counter. Ill show you why. First, look at his hand, trying tryin dial in and you can imagie the static on the radio. Trying to get the sou