The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Norman Rockwell · oil on canvas, 36 by 58 inches (91.4 by 147.3 cm), a horizontal of about 1.61 to 1, a frieze · a small girl in a white dress walking from left to right between four men in suits, all four cut off at the shoulders by the top edge, before a plastered wall bearing a racial slur, the letters KKK and a burst tomato · painted in 1963 for Look and reproduced in its issue of 14 January 1964 · Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts · the unit scored is the one canvas, as it stands; the magazine spread, the studies and the reproductions are context
Mode
American narrative illustration in exact realism, turned from the anecdote of ordinary life to a national wound, for a mass magazine
Mythos
The innocent walking a gauntlet between guardians toward a door unseen, built in the procession; innocence, blood on a wall and a martyr’s road evoked
Phase
One instant at mid-step on 14 November 1960, the first morning of desegregation at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans; painted in 1963, published in January 1964
Presentation
Oil on canvas, 36 by 58 inches, a frieze; five figures, one whole; a flat ground, even light and a narrow key of colour, made for reproduction
Register
Grave clarity; dignity held against defilement; a statement, not a mood
Scale
One child, four men without heads, one wall, one walk, and the crowd outside the frame
Governing Proposition
A small girl in a white dress walks along a pavement in step with four men whose heads the top edge of the canvas has cut away. Behind them a plain wall carries a slur, three letters and the burst of a thrown tomato; the crowd that wrote and threw is nowhere in the picture, because it stands where the viewer stands. The wager of the canvas is that the most familiar realism in American illustration, turned on a national wound and set before its own mass public, can make a child the only person in the scene, the state a stride without a face, and the one who looks a member of the mob the title calls “we all”.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
On 14 November 1960 Ruby Bridges, aged six, was escorted by federal marshals to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, on the first day of desegregation there. Norman Rockwell painted the walk in 1963, in oil on canvas, for Look, which reproduced it in its issue of 14 January 1964. It was his first major painting for the magazine after he left The Saturday Evening Post in 1963, and the title is his. The canvas is in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The unit scored is that one canvas, as it stands. The magazine spread is how the image first reached its public and is weighed under its presence only; the studies, the photographs Rockwell made of his models, and the later posters and reproductions are context and are not scored.
The canvas measures 36 by 58 inches, 91.4 by 147.3 centimetres, a horizontal of about 1.61 to 1: a frieze. A small Black girl in a white dress, white socks and white shoes walks from left to right along a pavement, carrying her school things. Four men in suits walk with her in step, two ahead and two behind, and all four are cut off at the shoulders by the top edge, so that no adult head appears anywhere in the picture. They wear armbands. Behind them is a plain plastered wall. On it a racial slur is scrawled in large capitals, with the letters KKK, and a thrown tomato has burst against it, its juice running down the plaster and its pulp lying on the pavement. No crowd is shown. There are five figures, one of them whole, and one face.
Judged by subtraction, almost nothing yields. Restore the men’s heads and the law becomes four men; remove the men and she is a child on a pavement. They must be four, two before and two behind, so that she is enclosed and still walks alone between them. The wall carries the mob, and the slur, the letters and the tomato are the whole crowd reduced to three marks. The white dress is required against the stained plaster. Two things say slightly more than the image needs: the things in her hands are particular rather than compelled, and the wall states its hatred twice, in a word and in initials, where either would carry it.
Movement II
The top edge of the canvas is the picture’s decisive line. It cuts the four men where a child of six would see them, at their bodies, and the viewpoint is set near her height to make that true. The cropping is her view and the state’s anonymity in one decision: the law that walks with her is armbands and a stride, and it has no face. The frieze carries the rest of what the picture knows, a march across a wide field from left to right with the child small in it and the movement unending. A photograph of the day exists, and it knows less, since it shows the marshals’ faces and makes them men. Much of this knowledge survives the passage to a page and a poster, as the image’s life has shown, and that holds the form short of the top of its axis.
The drawing of the walk is where the making stands highest. Eight legs move in step and the child’s two in a shorter rhythm, the weight of every body on the forward foot, drawn with complete authority. The white dress is modelled with very little, and the light on it is the light of the picture. The wall is a carefully varied plane of plaster, and the tomato’s burst and run are painted with a still-life painter’s precision. The costs are charged. The finish is the even, legible finish of illustration made for reproduction; the pavement and the ground are flat and summary; the colour is held in a narrow key that serves the printed page as much as the canvas. The drawing and the staging are superb, and the surface asks less of paint than the highest marks require.
The elevation is moral and of one kind: a small upright figure walking in step with grown men, her dress the brightest thing on the canvas against a wall that has been defiled. The stride is held at the instant of mid-step, so that she is always going on. The wall is a second height, the slur large and the red of the tomato running, a small terror set behind a child. What it draws from the viewer is a held breath and a tightening rather than transport, and it does not recur: once the eye has passed from the girl to the wall and back, the image has given what it gives.
Movement III
The crowd is present as one act. Someone threw the tomato, and it came from the side of the picture the viewer occupies: no one in the frame threw it, and the frame shows no one who could have. The canvas states something that holds outside its morning. A child bears in her body the cost of a nation’s law; the state that protects her has no face; the hatred is present only as what it leaves on a wall; and the one who looks stands where the mob stood. That is a meaning, not a mood. It is held short of the gate because the fact itself was already in the open, in the news photographs and film of 1960: the canvas discloses the arrangement of the fact more than the fact, and its sharpest disclosure, the viewer’s place, is real and single.
Take the two most distant things in the picture, the white dress and the red smear on the wall, and one law holds them: the law of the walk. Everything is either the procession or what the procession passes, and is placed by that line. The men’s bodies set the beat and the child keeps it; the wall is the still ground the movement crosses; the slur and the stain are the mob’s acts, left behind as the walkers go on. Even the cropping obeys the law, cutting at the height where movement and anonymity meet. Nothing stands outside it. The territory it governs is narrow, one wall, one walk, one instant, one register of grave clarity, and it governs that territory completely.
The structure the picture builds is the procession: the innocent walking a gauntlet between guardians, through a hostile world she does not look at, toward a door the picture never shows. The frieze carries it, and the rhythm of the legs, not an allusion; the guardians without heads give it an older shape, powers rather than persons around a child. The white dress as innocence, the red on the wall as blood and the echo of a martyr’s road are evoked rather than built. The particular stays fully particular, one child on one morning in New Orleans. The archetype is the obvious one, and the picture names it plainly; nothing in it carries a second, deeper pattern.
Movement IV
The title names the viewer. The problem is the one “we all” live with, and the canvas has already placed its viewer on the side the tomato came from. Behind the picture stands American narrative illustration, Rockwell’s own above all: the anecdotal scene of ordinary life, in exact realism for a mass magazine, warm in register and mild in politics. The departure is in subject and in one formal move: a national wound shown without comfort to that same mass audience, and the cropping of every adult head in a body of work built on faces and expressions. The stake was real for the painter, whose public loved him for a gentler America and was now shown itself. It was lower for the field. By 1963 Look was a liberal venue, the realism was proven, and the event had already been pictured. It is a turn of a career more than of an art.
In American painting and illustration of the early 1960s the canvas put the full authority of mass-magazine realism behind the civil rights movement at its height, and made the most popular illustrator in the country a witness against his own public. That reorganised what such a picture could be asked to do, within illustration. It reorganised no possibility of painting: its means were the ones Rockwell had used for forty years. Its reach as an image has been very wide and lasting, in schoolbooks, in the life of its subject and on a wall of the White House; in its field it redirected Rockwell’s own later pictures for Look and stands at the head of the civil rights image in popular art. No line of painters is shown to start from it. It is an emblem more than a redirection.
Its standing is 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV. American Gothic (8.0) stands level with it: two American realist images of national fame, one built on an archetype and one on a stated condition, the canvas winning four axes against it, losing four and tying three. Christina’s World (7.9) and Whaam! (7.9), the latter painted in the same year, stand a tenth below; Lichtenstein moved the field more, and Rockwell disclosed more. Migrant Mother (8.4), the nearest in kind, an image of an American social condition become an icon, stands above it on the disclosure and the archetype, since it was the primary document and built its own; this canvas restages a documented event. On the same subject of state violence and its witness, The Third of May 1808 (9.0) and Guernica (9.1) exceed it on every axis.
Movement V
At sixty-three years the canvas is whole. The image is the canvas as painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost, replaced or reworked by another hand. Its presence in its own country has been continuous and very wide, from the Look spread of January 1964 through reproduction in schoolbooks and exhibitions, and it hangs in a museum built around its maker. In 2011 it was lent to the White House, where Ruby Bridges viewed it with President Obama. Abroad its presence is narrower than that of the summit images of painting, and its standing as art has been contested even where its standing as image has not. It is an oil of sixty years in a museum, with no charge known against its fabric.
The questions it has sustained for six decades are real: whether Rockwell’s late political pictures redeem his sentimental realism or only extend it; whether the canvas speaks for its subject or over her, and how her own later testimony reframes it; why the mob is withheld and where that places the viewer; what it meant for the picture to hang in the White House. Each is a question about its frame, its maker or its reception more than about depths in the canvas. The image reads at once and completely, and the details, the armbands, the things in her hands, the run of juice down the plaster, are exact rather than inexhaustible. Return confirms it rather than opening it.
The orders it holds are childhood, in the one face; race, in the slur and the girl; the state and the law, in the marshals and the court order they enforce; education, in a school that is never shown; public violence, in the wall; history, in the morning it fixes; and the viewer’s conscience, in the place the frame assigns. One walk holds them together. The family is absent, since her parents are not there, and so are labour, the city, the sacred and the natural order; the child’s composure is given only from outside. It is a single scene that holds a nation’s argument in small. The figure describes the form. The men are still cut at the shoulder, the juice is still running down the wall, and she is still at mid-step.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged by subtraction, almost nothing yields. The child is the subject and the only face. The marshals cannot go: the picture is about protection by a state that has no face, and they must be four, two before her and two behind, so that she is enclosed and still walks alone between them. Restore their heads and the law becomes four men; remove them and she is a child on a pavement. The wall carries the mob: the slur, the letters and the tomato are the whole crowd reduced to three marks. The white dress is required against the stained plaster. What yields: the things in her hands are particular rather than compelled, and the wall states its hatred twice, in a word and in initials.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Something can be stated, and it holds. A child bears in her body the cost of a nation’s law. The state that protects her is present only as armbands and stride, faceless and impersonal; the hatred is present only as what it has left on a wall. And the canvas places its viewer where the mob stood: the tomato came from our side of the picture, and the title’s “we all” names the one who looks. That is an articulated social condition, the axis’s highest kind. What holds it three tenths below the gate is that the fact was already in the open, in the photographs and film of 1960; the canvas discloses the arrangement of the fact more than the fact, with a clarity that leaves little to uncover.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is moral and of one kind: the dignity of a small upright figure walking in step with grown men, her white dress the brightest thing on the canvas, against a wall that has been defiled. The stride is held at mid-step, so that she is always going on. A second height is the shock of the wall, the slur written large and the red of the tomato running, a small terror set behind a child. The response is a held breath and a tightening, not transport, and it does not recur: once the eye has gone from the girl to the wall and back, the image has given what it gives. The ground is flat and the light even, with no grandeur of light or space.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Built in one structure, evoked elsewhere. The built structure is the procession: the innocent walking a gauntlet between guardians, through a hostile world she does not look at, toward a door the picture never shows. The composition carries it, not allusion: the frieze, and the rhythm of eight adult legs and two small ones. The headless guardians give it an older shape, powers rather than persons around a child. Evoked and not built: the white dress as innocence, the red on the wall as blood, the echo of a martyr’s road. The particular stays particular, one child on one morning in New Orleans. What holds the axis is that the archetype is the obvious one, plainly named, with no second pattern beneath it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is American narrative illustration, Rockwell’s own above all: the anecdotal scene of ordinary life, told in exact realism for a mass magazine, warm in register and mild in politics. The departure is in subject and in one formal move. The subject is a national wound, shown without comfort to that same mass audience; the move is the cropping of every adult head, which his pictures, built on faces and expressions, had not made. The stake was real for the maker: a painter loved for a gentler America turned his public’s attention on itself. It was lower for the field: by 1963 Look was a liberal venue, the realism was proven, and the event had already been pictured. A turn of a career more than of an art.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The frieze is the knowledge: a march across a wide field from left to right, the child small within it, the movement unending. The viewpoint sits near her height, so that the frame cuts the men where she would see them, at their bodies; the cropping is her view and the state’s anonymity in one decision. The mob stands outside the frame on the viewer’s side, which only a picture with one fixed station can do; a film or a crowd scene would show them and let the viewer off. A photograph of the day shows the marshals’ faces and makes them men. Held below the top because much of the knowledge survives the passage to a page and a poster.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The lowest of the eleven axes the minimum governs, and what holds it there is that the image reads at once and completely. Evidence over promise: six decades, and the return has been real but bounded. The questions it has sustained are whether Rockwell’s late political pictures redeem his sentimental realism or extend it; whether the canvas speaks for its subject or over her, and how her own later testimony reframes it; why the mob is withheld and where that places the viewer; what it meant for the picture to hang in the White House in 2011. Each concerns the frame, the maker or the reception more than depths in the canvas. Return confirms the image rather than opening it.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is American painting and illustration of the early 1960s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real within illustration: the canvas puts the whole authority of mass-magazine realism behind the civil rights movement at its height, and makes the country’s best-loved illustrator a witness against his own public. It reorganises no possibility of painting; its means are those Rockwell had used for forty years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: as an image its reach is very wide and lasting, in schoolbooks, in the life of its subject and on a wall of the White House; in the field it redirected Rockwell’s own later pictures for Look and heads the civil rights image in popular art, but no line of painters is shown to start from it. Emblem more than redirection.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-three years. Form: whole; the image is the canvas as painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost, replaced or reworked by another hand. Presence: continuous and very wide in its own country, from the Look spread of January 1964 through schoolbooks and exhibitions to the White House in 2011, held in a museum built around its maker; fame is presence and lifts the figure a little. Abroad its presence is narrower than that of the summit images of painting, and its standing as art has been contested where its standing as image has not. Fabric: an oil of sixty years in a museum, with no known charge.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of oil painting, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is exact and in places load-bearing. The stride is drawn with complete authority, eight legs in step and the child’s two in a shorter rhythm, the weight of each body on the forward foot; the white dress is modelled with very little, and the light on it is the light of the picture. The wall is a carefully varied plane of plaster, and the burst and run of the tomato are painted with a still-life painter’s precision. The costs are charged: an even, legible finish made for reproduction, a flat and summary pavement and ground, and a narrow key of colour that serves the print as much as the canvas.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the white dress and the red smear of the tomato. One law holds them, the law of the walk: everything in the picture is either the procession or what the procession passes, and is placed by that line. The marshals’ bodies set the beat and the child keeps it; the wall is the still ground the movement crosses; the slur and the stain are the mob’s acts, left behind as the walkers go on. Even the cropping obeys the law, cutting at the height where movement and anonymity meet. Nothing stands outside it. Held below the top because the territory is narrow, one wall, one walk, one instant, one register of grave clarity, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The lowest of the twelve, and the form explains it. The orders held: childhood, in the one face; race, in the slur and the girl; the state and the law, in the federal marshals and the court order they enforce; education, in the school she walks toward, which is never shown; public violence, in the wall; history, in the morning the picture fixes; and the viewer’s conscience, in the place the frame assigns. One walk integrates them, and the integration is achieved, not listed. What is absent or only implied holds the axis: the family, since her parents are not there, labour, the city, the sacred, the natural order, and any consciousness but the child’s composure, given only from outside. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Made at 8.6 and The Inevitable and The Living Form at 8.4. A canvas whole as painted after sixty-three years and continuously present in its own country since its publication in 1964; a drawing of the walk and a painting of the dress and the stain that few realists of the century matched; an image reduced to its necessities, the child, four men without heads and a wall; and a frieze, a child’s viewpoint and a mob outside the frame that together are what the picture knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: childhood, race, the state, education, public violence, history and the viewer’s conscience held in one walk, with the family, labour, the city, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Bottomless Well at 7.4: an image that reads at once and completely, whose six decades of questions concern its frame and reception more than its depths. Then The Sublime at 7.5: one moral elevation, sustained and not repeated. Then The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: the obvious archetype plainly named, a turn of a career more than of an art, and an emblem more than a redirection.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 falls short by three tenths, and The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 by nine each, one gate of five. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Bottomless Well, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5; every other axis the minimum governs clears it, The Sublime exactly at 7.5. The Encompassed, which is exempted from the minimum, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. The twelve sum to 95.5, an average of 7.96 that displays 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV, one tenth of the sum above the line at which the tier begins; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate and the minimum, and the aggregate, a full point short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas and of its well-documented history: the image known closely, in the object and in its reproductions, the dimensions stated with confidence, and small details of lettering and props held more loosely. No image or written source was consulted, and the surface was not examined at first hand. The work scored is the single canvas, The Problem We All Live With, oil, 36 by 58 inches (91.4 by 147.3 cm), painted in 1963, in the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as it stands: whole, with nothing that carries its meaning lost, replaced or repainted by another hand. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited as the work: the spread in Look of 14 January 1964, which bears on presence under The Imperishable; Rockwell’s studies and the photographs he made of his models; and the later posters and reproductions. The event of 14 November 1960 is the subject, and the news photographs and film of that day are context. Only the title is quoted; the slur on the painted wall is described and not reproduced, and no words of the painter or of his subject are quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them what exactly the child carries, the lettering of the armbands, who the models were, the months of the White House showing and where in the building it hung, the letters the painter is said to have received after publication, the exact palette, the condition of the canvas and any history of restoration.