Norman Rockwell & His Contemporaries: Fabulous Forties to Sensational Sixties

The period from the 1940s through the 1960s was a tumultuous time in the history of the United States. Significant political and social changes defined daily life for Americans as a result of the frequent shift between wartime and peacetime. 

Featuring original paintings, works on paper, vintage posters, and accompanying artifacts, Norman Rockwell & His Contemporaries: Fabulous Forties to Sensational Sixties, highlights the changes to daily life in America during three very different decades. Through illustrations created for advertisements, magazines, newspapers, and more, artists showed how American culture and values changed in concert with the constant political unrest. The exhibition culminates with a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on July 20th, 1969.

During WWII, while American men fought for the side of the Allies, women experienced new-found freedom as they entered the work force, taking on the jobs that were left behind. When the War ended, many of the veterans who returned home went back to work, got married, and started families. This ushered in the era of the 1950s Nuclear Family – a term for the stereotypical family consisting of a working husband, housewife, and typically two children. Images of leisure and wholesome family life prevailed in the Fifties. The Sixties brought the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, seeking to overturn political policies and improve the daily lives of women and minorities. The travel boom expanded the average American’s accessibility to the rest of the world – and beyond. It was also this increase in technological innovation that led to an American, Neil Armstrong, becoming the first person to set foot on the moon.

Norman Rockwell & His Contemporaries: Fabulous Forties to Sensational Sixties explores this exciting time in American history through the images of the Nation's most beloved illustrators, reflecting and molding the society evolving around them.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website