NORMAN ROCKWELL - Beyond Magic Realism, Atman Art.

The Hidden Genius of Norman Rockwell.

 Five decades of Nostalgia, Patriotism, Politics and Propaganda at the Saturday Evening Post and then BOOM
-- BOTH barrels (pointed at the Post?)-- the explosion of unbridled creativity/reality...
the creativity that finally woke Rockwell up to the exact same reality bigots and racists and the KKK needed to wake up to,
 as did the Country and indeed the whole World -- but not The Saturday Evening Post.

Robert Fawcett

John Atherton

Saturday Evening Post cover Jan 1961 by Norman Rockwell.

Norman Adams painted the background and then pasted it onto the original background Norman Rockwell painted. Adams then added a rose (not seen) and also pasted it onto the original. 

After the painting was photographed for the Post cover, Norman Adams removed the stuck-on background and the rose to leave the original “white” background Rockwell painted. The image below is from Sotheby’s Auction for the 29 NOV 2006 auction with a NEW background and a NEW rose. “NEW” because Adams still has the background he pasted-on and then removed off the original. The two images behind Nehru below are very unlike anything Rockwell would have added -- ESPECIALLY after Norman Adams was paid to butcher his original . And how did Rockwell’s name  move?

Robert Fawcett

John Atherton

The Hidden Genius of Norman Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell: The Problem We All Live With. 
Oil painting for LOOK Magazine, Jan 14, 1964.

There is a message in this painting that only the little girl can tell, and then a lot lot more.

In the ideal world this little girl in a white dress would be Alice in Wonderland. But this painting tells another story. It tells another story about Four Headless Giants that for this little girl has to be Norman Rockwell's “real Four Freedoms.”

There are messages in this painting that are screaming. First and most obvious: the guards have no heads. In contrast to everything else, there is the pure white dress, bow, white sox and shoes. Then the paper, “orders,” in the pocket of the front guard.

 In the painting the giants are in step, and the little girl is out of step, She is also not centered -- like she is more afraid of the giants behind her than she is of the ones she can see.

Maybe what Norman Rockwell is obviously trying to tell us in this picture is that this little girl is not stupid: she knows exactly what white men look like without their white hoods.

 If there are any doubts about Norman Rockwell’s obvious message in this painting then the other paintings he painted at this time can leave no doubts as to why he cut off the heads of these guards.

=-=

This Little Girl's message, however, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. 

Only without a head can these headless-giants give us a message far-far more profound than anything the little girl can imagine. 

If John Atherton could speak from his early grave he would tell us about these mindless giants.

Perhaps the most creative artist the world had before a heart attack suddenly took him was John Atherton, 1900-1952. He was one of Rockwell's closest friends. Atherton tells us about these headless-giants.

 Just like Rockwell, Atherton painted illustrations for magazines. But unlike Rockwell he did not like painting for magazines. Atherton did not like the way the publishing industry was feeding the hypocritical nostalgia, patriotism, politics and propaganda the war-industry needed to keep selling its mass-produced weapons to countries so that it could then go to war with them. It would take the Spirit-inside Rockwell a few decades before it exploded to make him realize what the Spirit-inside his best friend was talking about.

The Headless and thus mindless Giants -- that would otherwise need white cone-shaped hoods -- are the “real Four Freedoms” that Atherton would have called Nostalgia, Patriotism, Politics and Propaganda -- that serve organizations like the KKK far more than they can serve anyone else.

These four-giants have always been the pawns for the <1% of the mindless population that own >99% of the world’s wealth. This <1% of the populations owns >99% of the world's wealth by using these mindless-giants for all the never-ending wars, revolutions, uprisings and invasions they need to try and extract the last <1% of the wealth out of the exploited and often starving >99% of the world's population.

The message these headless-giants give us, that the little-girl could not imagine: If these four-giants had just one head between them all, then they would have to use it to solve the world's problems by taking this little-girl out behind the barn and shoot her. So that they could then get back to the only thing that really matters to them, their four-freedoms that groups like the KKK, Communists and Nazis, need far more than anyone else: Nostalgia, Patriotism, Politics and Propaganda.

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The “real Four Freedoms:
 Nostalgia, Patriotism, Politics and Propaganda.

For nearly 50 years Norman Rockwell's creativity was a stooge for the Saturday Evening Post. For decades the Saturday Evening Post paid artists, Illustrators, to whitewash history with the Nostalgia, Patriotism, Propaganda and Politics that covered up all the ways <1% of the population needed to use the Depression and then their never-ending wars to plunder the world of >99% of its wealth. Harold von Schmidt who turned down doing the covers for the Saturday Evening Post knew it. And Rockwell more or less had to also know that he was a stooge because his best friend and fellow Illustrator John Atherton more or less told him. 

And indeed Norman Rockwell himself admits he was just a propaganda stooge for the Saturday Evening Post when he tells us in his Famous Artists textbook that only once did he try to break away from the Post’s format and it triggered an explosion of such anger and fury at the Post that he never tried being creative again, UNTIL he later left the Post.   But Norman Rockwell probably did not realize just how big a stooge he was until he finally left the Post and exploded with both barrels to finally create the paintings .. that he was never allowed to paint while he was whitewashing history with the propaganda, nostalgia and fanatical patriotism the Nation needed for two World Wars and then a Cold War ... and then Korea and Vietnam -- just so that <1% of the population (One World Order) could keep plundering their world for >99% of its wealth. 

Towards the end the editors of the Post hated Rockwell, certainly the  “Scandinavian” Art Director did. And Rockwell must have known it after they literally forced Norman Adams to butcher his Nehru painting.  It was probably this hate that made Rockwell explode with the civil-rights paintings that personify hate. 

 Compared to the giants of illustration like John Atherton, Robert Fawcett and Von Schmidt, Norman Rockwell was a second if not third rate illustrator. Once he left the Post, however, he exploded with the creativity that his decades at the Post set the stage for, a creativity that went far far beyond anything Fawcett, Atherton and Harold von Schmidt could have imagined.

When Norman Rockwell finally exploded with the creativity that he had kept brewing inside for over 50 years it was an explosion of Atman Art. He finally exploded with the creativity that HE had to do FOR HIMSELF...  and not for the Saturday Evening Post that for decades has used nostalgia, propaganda and patriotism to specifically whitewash all the bigotry, racism and corruption that was literally running the country, one bloody war after the other. 

-- Geza Palotas.

Atman: A concrete word for the fiction we call heaven. 

Atman is the universal spirit that all the ecstatic saints of all religions tell us is inside each one of us. Jesus called it “Heaven is Inside.” Physics calls it the Unified Field. The 5000 year old “Supreme Science” that gave us Advaita calls it the thoughtless Silence of dreamless-sleep, Samadhi.

It is the feelings of this Heaven Inside that is the: Creativity is its own reward, the “SurrealBliss of kundalini.”

Susan E. Meyer:
 Norman Rockwell’s People.

The story behind Both Barrels.

While Rockwell was in Europe at the end of 1962 the Saturday Evening Post gave the Charles E. Cooper Studio a job to make revisions to Rockwell’s Nehru painting. This by itself was highly unusual. It was a supreme insult to get someone else to butcher the painting of an artist. But this was especially the case when the artist is the most recognized artist in the Country. Cooper gave the job to the young Norman Adams. 

What made this even more absurd was that Adams told what he calls the “Scandinavian” art director: that any changes would only obviously destroy a perfectly good painting. The more Adams tried to convince the Scandinavian that he would be only ruining a perfectly good painting the more the Scandinavian got furious until he told Adams that if he did not “ruin” the painting then he would get someone else.

So the young Norman Adams did as he was told/paid and -- as he still insists to this very day -- he ruined a perfectly good Norman Rockwell painting. To Norman Adams this whole scenario told him that the pundits at the Post were literally doing everything they could to insult and piss Rockwell off ... for nearly five decades Rockwell worked like a slave to give the Post everything they wanted and now they were pissing him off because for nearly five decades he gave then everything they wanted. 

 And it is highly unlikely that Rockwell did not also get the message of hate when he saw his Nehru painting butchered behind his back. And so it is also not surprising that this Nehru painting was one of the last paintings Rockwell painted for the Post. 

geza palotas

info@normanadams.org

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