Well, certainly, I can’t. This painting, “Southern Justice”, was painted by Rockwell in 1965 to commemorate the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba, Mississippi—Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Cheney. I was entirely unaware of its existence until I read a very long article on Rockwell that appeared recently in Vox, “The awakening of Norman Rockwell”, by Tom Carson, apropos of nothing, so far as I can determine.
Carson, for whatever reason, does not include a reproduction of this painting to accompany his article, though he does discuss it. He does reproduce “The Problem We All Live With” (shown below), which I both reproduced and discussed in a post in my blog, “Norman Rockwell, Social Justice Warrior”, two years ago.
As anyone who knows Rockwell’s style can see, in “The Problem We All Live With”, he repurposed his cutesy, cluttered, realistic style to expose American hypocrisy instead of “celebrating” it. But in “Southern Justice” Rockwell ruthlessly strips away all the clutter to present a picture of naked brutality and horror, the bizarre shadows of the approaching murderers seen at the right lower margin of the painting being the only touch of the standard Rockwell story-telling.
Another painting, “Blood Brothers”, shown below, apparently never appeared, first starting out as a commentary on the bloody sixties race riots and then, apparently, set to be in Vietnam before being discarded entirely. According to Carson, Rockwell’s long-time employer, the Saturday Evening Post, had undergone a radical updating in 1961, pushing Rockwell out. He moved to Look, a forgotten rival to the almost forgotten Life, where both “The Problem We All Live With” and “Southern Justice” appeared. 1 But apparently “Blood Brothers” was too much, even for Look.
Curiously, both Carson and the Wikipedia entry for Rockwell dance around what is more than obvious, that Rockwell, born in 1894, was a painfully repressed homosexual, who obsessively painted a cozy fantasy of the middle-class straight world to which he could never belong—at immense profit—finally daring to come out of the closet to the extent of showing his sympathy for the black victims of American racism, and in both “Southern Justice” and “Blood Brothers”, implicitly depicting murderous homophobia as well.
1. The Saturday Evening Post was once the most popular magazine in America, and also the most significant outlet for mainstream fiction in the U.S., publishing authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, not to mention Edgar Allan Poe (it began publication in 1821). Life, relying heavily on pictures, supplanted the Post as the country’s leading magazine in the 1930s. Look was founded in imitation. All three were destroyed by television in the sixties, as the internet is destroying print media in general today.
My high school art teacher
(Who l loved) abhorred Norman Rockwell. He said to reproduce the scene”you might as well just use a brownie camera”