10 minutes with Laurie Norton Moffatt

Director/CEO of the Norman Rockwell Museum

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge has come a long, long way. Under the leadership of Laurie Norton Moffatt, the museum is a world-class institution that houses not only Rockwell’s monumental works, but also works by other prominent illustrators. It’s hard to envision the museum without Laurie, who has served as its director for four decades. But, according to her, there couldn't be a better time to transition to a new director. Our coverage of the museum through the years has been extensive, and that has a lot to do with Laurie, who has been accessible and receptive to our story ideas, big and small, as well as our collaborations. It’s no exaggeration to say that the art world’s view of illustration has significantly evolved during Laurie’s tenure. She might not say it, but I will: Laurie had a hand in shifting that perception. During a recent conversation at the Norman Rockwell Museum, she talked about her time there, the tremendous community support during her tenure, and her unwavering admiration of Rockwell and his art.

Tell me about being a docent at the Norman Rockwell Museum, which is how you began. The summer that I started working here, I had done a junior year exchange at Williams College. I returned to my alma mater, Connecticut College, and then worked again at the museum the summer after my graduation year. That fall, Norman Rockwell died, in November of 1978. He was not all that well the last year of his life, and I did not meet him in person. I'm sorry I didn’t meet him, but I feel I came to know him over time, especially through the words and eyes of people who did know him.

So, you were a docent in the Old Corner House, which was the first location of the museum? Yes. It's now offices for Austen Riggs. It's an old house, and there were six rooms that served as galleries and two rooms cordoned off that were offices. A tour was the only way to see the art. On a busy weekend day, there might have been seven or eight guides, and every 15 minutes, another tour started.

How did you prepare yourself to give tours? All the rooms had to move at the same time because they would all be full. It was just astonishing how busy and already popular the museum was. When I started working there, I was not aware that the museum was only seven years old. It had spread by word of mouth that Rockwell's paintings could be seen there. We were given notecards that had information about the paintings and historical information points of interest in the art. We had time to learn them, and we also went on many different tours with other guides to learn. One of the most memorable moments was when I was giving a tour to a group of Deaf people, and they had a sign language interpreter. I was talking about the Checkers piece, with the clown playing checkers, and he gestures to the ringmaster as if saying, “I've got you. I'm gonna check you.” The group got very animated and were all signing. “What did I do?” I asked. Their interpreter translated what they were all saying. They noticed that the clown’s hand was signing, “I won.” So, the question was, did Rockwell know that in 1928? Very unlikely, but certain gestures are universal, right? It just shows how observant Rockwell was of human nature, people’s emotions, moods, expressions, and details, and was able to paint it. 

That’s really interesting. Yes, that was fun. 

You were going to school in Connecticut, then you did a residency at Williams College? At that time, there were 12 colleges that had just gone co-educational. Connecticut College had been an all-women’s college. Williams had been all men. To begin to blend classes, any student of any of those colleges could apply to attend one of the other colleges for their junior year and then return to their own college. I was working here in the summer of my junior year and was looking for a part-time summer museum job with my art history major. I had learned about this museum and applied and was hired. I was working full time running the marina on Pontoosuc Lake for the YMCA that summer, too. I was 19.

Your family was living here? My family moved to the Berkshires when I was four. I went through the Pittsfield public school system and have lived in Stockbridge since I graduated.

How did that evolve from being a docent into being a full-time employee? There was a research project that had begun two years earlier to catalog and discover where all of Norman Rockwell's paintings were. There was no complete documentation of his life's work at that point. The two women researchers working on the project were moving on. They'd been guides, just like I was, and I was asked if I'd like to continue the project. I was an art history major. I was thrilled, so I leapt at the opportunity. It was a great big research project to determine everything Rockwell had done. We knew what was in our collection, which was 120 pieces. Now there are 800 something, not all finished works. I spent many days in the New York Public Library pulling periodicals from the reference center, going through pages of Boys’ Life magazine, identifying everything he had painted. There was no record of the full breadth of his career. Nobody knew where the artwork had gone to, other than what he had; some things had gone home with executives at The Saturday Evening Post. At the time, it was a great big matching game. It was a huge research project in determining what he had done for all these magazines. It involved going through correspondence in his studio, the letters that had been written or requests from people for a work of art. Even now, I can't imagine how we did it all. There was no internet. It was all letters, phone calls, visits, reaching out to the auction houses, to galleries, asking if any Rockwells had come in, to please let us know because we're creating a catalog.

You got to know Rockwell really well. Yes, I spent eight years on that project. The result was a two-volume catalog of everything he had done. There was no digital photography; there was no scanning. We weren't even using a database computer system. It was all manual records. There were 4,000 records—remembering what he had done, its association, which magazine. What I did was set up the organizing principle around how his work was cataloged and known. Over time, we probably came to know the whereabouts of about 50 percent of his work, maybe more now. We know there were things that were lost or destroyed in a studio fire, or that early magazines didn't keep all the original art that illustrators were creating. Some would just have a closet full of work that would get thrown out. We had people talk about rescuing things from the incinerator and paintings found in attics. This is not uncommon for artist museums to do the comprehensive research of the artists. We’re expected to know what he did. Prior to that book, there was no place you could go to know the breadth and fullness of all that he had created.

And it’s a living document. It's always changing. Now it's all online. A study shows up, and we can verify that it's very clear that it goes with this painting. It involves authentication, connoisseurship, and we can then add to the information around a work.

You were a researcher for eight years? I first had a title of archivist, and then I was appointed curator about two years into that, which involved not just the book project but the exhibitions, the art on the walls, the teaching of tours to broader curatorial work. The book was published in 1986. My predecessor was stepping away from his role, and at that point, I was the nation's Rockwell expert. You couldn't study Rockwell in an art history program. It wasn’t taught. If it was, it was somewhat disparagingly referenced. At that point, we were just bursting at the seams in the Old Corner House, and the board was working toward the project of a new home, and they asked me to become director and build the new museum. So, I started on another project I had no experience with but had a phenomenal mentor, my board president, Lila Berle. For ten years, we were a team. We partnered and did the work to build this building.

So, you were named director in 1986 at just 29 years old. What paintings have resonated with people and with you during your tenure? Different works began to stand out for me. My process of new observations and perspectives on his art is the arc and length of my career of working with his work. Starting at age 19. Director at age 29. And then going through many of the life stages, decade by decade—having parents, parenting, losing parents, the stages of my life and also the stages of the country as one becomes more aware of contemporary events, of history, of politics, of society, cultures, other countries, as well as the opportunity to travel. I was always seeing Rockwell's work through new perspectives and opportunities that I was having around me. What became very clear to me was a deepening sophistication and gravitas of his subjects and his messaging and the nuances in them, and his extraordinary—I call it a genius—way of understanding human nature and his powers of observation. Look at an expression. Look at the clown gesturing. Look at the woman saying grace, taking time at a busy diner to give a moment of thanks with her grandson as onlookers are watching respectfully. At different stages, different works came into focus for me. How he did that is amazing. If you read his autobiography, or you read books on him, you'll read the stories of the "Four Freedoms" and his response to how to visualize freedom, and him turning to everyday people and everyday moments to articulate those grand ideals. That became the beginning of a journey for him of really launching his civil rights work, his action, even before the Civil Rights Movement, joining the NAACP long before he was painting the civil rights work and working for Look magazine, including models and persons of color in his paintings when they weren't published at that time. There’s the arc of how he began to use his platform, if you will, to communicate big ideas. 

One of the things that stands out for me is what a unifier Rockwell was. He had the attention and the affection of his viewers. At the time, visual media was very much a communication tool—Saturday Evening Post or Look magazines—and there wasn't the fragmentation that we have today with so many media sources. He had a prominent platform, and he was able to bridge divides. He was able to motivate action. He was able to inspire people to change their minds about things. Rockwell was someone who knew how to get to the core of an issue and invite everybody to see it in a kindly way, in a non-judgmental, non-threatening way. The little girl walking to school, a picture of innocence and courage. Why would we have different standards for any child? Standing up at a town meeting, speaking. People are listening, looking at the speaker respectfully, even though they didn't agree with him and voted down the issue. How remarkable. It was a different era, a different time, but Rockwell spoke to everyone. He represented everyone, every profession you can think of, every race, every religion, he really tried to make space for everyone. 

All of the success around this museum is embedded in Rockwell's talent and his genius. He painted and created and observed and told the story of America in his era and historically, as well. All that talent was always there. It wasn't recognized by the art world at the time when I was a student, but it was recognized by the public, by the viewers of his art. For me, that was a really jarring experience, to be a student—an art history student—hearing one thing and to be observing visitors having an extraordinary connection and experience with the art. What speaks more loudly in my mind is people's experience with art and with an artist. There was always a deep respect for Norman Rockwell. The building of this museum is an indication of the board's decision that this man's art deserves a museum. We were not, at the time, a museum of illustration art. We were focused on creating a home for Rockwell's work and the scholarship behind it.

Did you find it to be your mission to change that perception of Rockwell in the art world? It was always inherent in the commitment of building a museum and believing that the work was important. We've always viewed this collection as a national collection. We're here in this beautiful village of Stockbridge, in one of Rockwell's hometowns, but he was an artist of the people and of the nation, and so we've always aimed to serve the nation and also globally through the museum, representing at least a period of time in America.

What did you see as your mission? It was important in my mind that Rockwell be respected by the art world, the art community, and that the public's enjoyment of him not be dismissed. That their appreciation and respect for him not be dismissed by an art world that, frankly, hadn't even seen the original paintings. And you couldn't see them easily. Even now, with any illustrator’s work that appears in a publication, whether it's online or in a magazine, you're not seeing the painting behind it to realize the talent and skill that goes into being able to tell a full story in a single frame. That's what filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas marvel at, that Rockwell can tell an entire story in one frame. They really admire his ability to be a visual storyteller, and that's what illustrators are. It wasn't only Rockwell who didn't garner that art world respect. Illustrators, in general, didn’t. It was viewed as commercial art and applied practice. There was a sense that it was lesser when, in fact, illustrators are artists who have an incisive ability to go to the heart and core of a message and visualize it in a single image. That's an extraordinary skill that not all artists can do. Illustrators are trained to convey the essential message.

That’s also an evolution of this museum, to not only represent Norman Rockwell but other illustrators, as well. It was the recognition that he was not an isolated phenomenon. Maybe he reached a pinnacle in his career that few, if any, achieved to the degree that he did. But his forebearers were the artists who inspired him, Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth and all the Golden Age illustrators. And then J.C. Leyendecker and Maxfield Parrish. And then Rockwell went on to inspire other illustrators who came after him. So, it was this whole cycle. All their lineage went right back to a few studios in Europe that were teaching the artists at the time. There were three different schools, and those artists had come out of those different schools, and they wove together in a period of time. So it is really a grand tradition of training and art. Then it was the rise of publishing, the need for illustrated media that began in the mid-19th century. Then the advancement of technology and color printing. Illustrations always have been tied together with technology and however it was disseminated. We define illustration as art that is distributed by mass media to mass audiences, the idea being it's not only seen by one viewer in a gallery setting or a living room setting or in your salon. It’s seen by millions of people, and it's impressionable in that sense. It's reflecting society. It's shaping thought and opinion. 

You’ve been referred to as a visionary leader. It must be incredible to be connected to an institution that has evolved so significantly. What was the vision when you first started, and how did that shift? I was given the assignment to work on the catalog and produce that book and that project, but my interest in doing it was really because I believed Rockwell should be understood, respected, and preserved so his legacy would endure. It's not entirely certain that it would have without the board's commitment to building the museum and his generosity to make his art available to the public. It’s very important that it's understood that I did not build or lead this museum alone. I have incredible board partners. I've had phenomenal executive staff and team and devoted, loyal people here who love sharing Rockwell's work. He deserves to be remembered and respected. His work is a national treasure, and it should be understood and cared for and experienced and enjoyed that way.

And that vision has continued up until now? That has continued, and I think the deepening work we did, the commitment to sustaining scholarship beyond the initial catalog publication, was when we established the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, creating a field of study around illustration art. There are 30 or so museums, maybe more now, who have academic studies centers affiliated within their institutions. The Clark is one, the Getty, the American Antiquarian Society, and now the Dali is a center for abstract surrealism. Sustaining that scholarship and embedding Rockwell as the centerpiece in this larger field of illustration, that mission shifted in 2008 and 2010, when we had done two major Rockwell traveling exhibitions. The story was important to broaden. We were already doing changing exhibitions since we had opened; presenting other artists’ works. So, the pivot and decision at that moment was to begin collecting it. When we first opened here, we agreed we would do the changing exhibitions, but we needed to focus our resources on Rockwell. We were heavily mortgaged on this building. We were building the collection. We were building out our programming. And then came the recognition that Rockwell would be more enduring and more impactful and understood as a figure, as a leading artist, by recognizing the field that he came out of. Rockwell always called himself an illustrator. You’ll see in museums in Europe how they value illustration art. It's part of a long tradition. Rockwell was always looking at the artists who came before him, in this very classical tradition of how you make a painting: the drawings, the studies, what they would call “cartoons” in Europe, the big life-sized drawings that he made right before he did each painting. 

So, things really shifted in 2010, when you started collecting other artists? Yes, there are now about 25,000 pieces that include the Famous Artists School, the major mid-century teaching course on how to become an illustrator. It was really born out of the end of World War II, when there was this huge flourishing of magazines, publications, advertising—it was a push to sell commercial products. There was a demand for illustrators, and that was a training school, especially for artists who didn't live in major cities where art schools were generally located. So, we began collecting. It was also a response to the fact that there were so many collections needing a home. Prior to that time, there were only a handful of museums collecting illustrations, and there were major libraries that were repositories of illustration because it was linked to books and publishing. But the original materials were imperiled to be lost or forgotten. People were taking care of an ancestor’s art, and they couldn't keep managing these collections. So, creating a home for them not only preserved and saved some important collections, but it began to spark other museums to collect. 

Have you reached the goals that you set during your tenure? Yes, it's one of the reasons I felt this was the right moment to initiate transition. We certainly wanted to rebuild to a position of financial stability coming out of the pandemic—getting our exhibitions on the road again, building our team back, and the campus planning that we've been working on. There are some wonderful plans in place that the board and our team have been doing over the last year. So, I think the stage is well set for work to continue, and we want to do that at a moment of great strength and opportunity. There's always exciting work to do, and I'm always galvanized by the next idea, but it's a good moment to invite a new leader in and continue to connect this museum with today's world. 

Is there a timeline for your leaving? It’s loose. We said 12 to 18 months. It's really the amount of time it takes to do a search, have time for somebody to make the transition to come here, introduce them to our patrons, and whatever else that would be helpful. 

Is there anything that you're paying special attention to or completing? There are some special projects I'm working on with the board. The big thing is the need for the curatorial collection center. We’ve been looking at the Old Town Hall. We've been looking at another building off site. We’re now examining how we will accomplish that if we were to do it on this site. It’s work space, it’s collections processing space, maybe a study center, a print room, a place where you can actually come and look at art and receive a class. So, there would be educational components to it. It's still a very formative idea, but it's part of the long-range plan of the museum.

Will you stay connected to the museum after retiring? I continue to serve on the Accreditation Commission for the American Alliance of Museums, so that has me deeply connected with the museum field, as well as some other volunteer boards I serve on. I'm not going to lack for things to do, but I'm looking forward to space for reflection and “being” more than “doing,” so that whatever wants to blossom in that next chapter has space to do.

What was your biggest challenge and your biggest joy? They are probably the same project, and that was doing this building. The reason it was so joyful was the collaborative partnership with Lila Berle and the board, the determination and the will that this museum would happen. We had zoning challenges. We had citizen challenges. We had fundraising challenges. We took a long time to actually achieve it, but most museum projects are 10 to 18 years. This was 13 years, from the glimmer of the idea to when we opened the door. The joy of it and the commitment of this community to making it happen was unparalleled. And there have been many, many, many moments along the way that we can connect—when we did our United Nations exhibition, certainly President Obama borrowing Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With painting. Those moments where the art was reflecting a larger humanity message. The "Four Freedoms" exhibition on the commemoration of D-Day in France, honoring those veterans and those who had given their lives. These paintings helped inspire this nation to defend and preserve freedom. If there was any tug, it's the important work this museum still has to do in the world. The role we serve still inspires me, and we are filled with ideas of ways that this collection can be helpful to the people. I think one of Rockwell’s hallmarks is he always came from a place of optimism. Even in his hardest personal moments, he found hope and optimism and portrayed that. That's why people are so deeply drawn to him, and I think the work still has that purpose and role in the world. I hope the museum continues to present it and share it in those ways. It reminds us of times when we were fiercely divided as a nation but found common ground and found ways to move forward. I think that's an inspiring message. This country—the world—has weathered very hard, difficult, challenging times, and artists help carry people through that—not only visual artists, but musicians, writers, the theater, dance. That was Rockwell’s role: to help uplift people, to find and see hope.

—Anastasia Stanmeyer