Thread by @doctorow

I hadn't known that at the end of his career, Norman Rockwell became a political radical, breaking with the Saturday Evening Post over his desire to depict the civil rights struggle.

vox.com/the-highlight/…

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Writing in @voxdotcom,Tom Carson describes how Rockwell's personal tragedies - the death of his wife - and the advice of his therapist helped him transform into an acerbic, radical painter, the opposite of who we remember him as.

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Switching from the Post to Look Magazine, Rockwell depicted such subjects as 6-y-o Ruby Bridges being escorted into an all-white school by federal marshalls who led her past howling mobs of white supremacists.

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He went on to paint a depiction of the imagined last moments of civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, who were tortured and murdered by white nationalists.

nrm.org/MT/text/Murder…

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A staunch anti-war activist, he pestered LBJ with an endless stream of telegrams demanding negotiations, not bombings, in Vietnam (ironically, he voted for Nixon in the hopes that he would end the war).

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Further irony: the last substantial painting he completed was of Nixon after his election win: "This time around, he managed what he’d once said was impossible. His subject looks like a nice man who is, nonetheless, unmistakably Richard Nixon."

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It's the only Rockwell painting in the National Portrait Gallery.

npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG…

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