Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg »

Virginia M. Mecklenburg is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among her books are Modern Masters, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors, and Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, which won the Alfred H. Barr Jr. award in 1997.

Todd McCarthy is the longtime chief film critic for Variety. His books include Kings of the Bs, Howard Hawks, and Fast Women: The Legendary Ladies of Racing. He won an Emmy Award for writing the documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer.

Telling Stories, based on the Rockwell collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, is the first book to chart the connections between Rockwell’s iconic depictions of American life and the movies. Rockwell, the quintessential American mythmaker of the 20th century, was a storyteller on a par with the great Hollywood directors of his time, and touched the lives of the two most successful directors of our day. Within Rockwell’s art, the fantasies and foibles of ordinary people are given life, central among them the themes of love of country, the sanctity of family, and the value of personal honor. Telling Stories, which accompanies an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is richly illustrated with Rockwell images, photographs, and film stills.

Publishers Weekly

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) is renowned for his Saturday Evening Post covers, but less known for his influence on filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who have extensive collections of his work. Accompanying an exhibition of their collections at the Smithsonian (opening this month), the catalogue frames Rockwell as a mythmaking storyteller who approached his subjects cinematically and revealed universal truths through the American vernacular. Smithsonian curator Mecklenburg provides an informative and crisply composed narrative of Rockwell's professional and personal life, re-evaluating conventional interpretations of both. Rockwell, she argues, "may have led a simple life, but was not a simple man," and his carefully constructed images reflected the need to juggle a number of sometimes competing factors: shifting editorial policies and the need to stay current while delivering images with universal appeal. Her text, richly complemented by scores of illustrations and photographs, traces the artist's evolution from an illustrator for children's magazines to a beloved artist. Of great appeal to the general reader interested in Rockwell or the intersection of art and film narrative. 118 color and 25 b&w illus. (July)