Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter vs. Rosie the Westinghouse Employee

January 20, 2022 10:21 PM

Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter vs. Rosie the Westinghouse Employee.
posted by MollyRealized (36 comments total)

Wow!

I love the original so much.
posted by freethefeet at 10:26 PM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is a good thing to post about. Not too many people know this, and they should.
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:16 PM on January 20, 2022

Check out the best post on Norman Rockwell's work which fleshes out the Rosie comparison with a bit more detail.
posted by latkes at 11:18 PM on January 20, 2022 [31 favorites]

I don't have a lot of cultural familiarity with Norman Rockwell, but I gather that he was a painter known for relatively anodyne depictions of mid-century Americana, which gradually gave way to quietly devastating depictions of America as it actually existed later in his life.

What I remember specifically is that he had a series of paintings called The Four Freedoms, supposedly America's values in those halcyon days: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

Those last two, I think, feel radical these days.
posted by Merus at 11:36 PM on January 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

Latkes, MY FACE HAS MELTED OFF

What a fucking read! That article was amazing!

WCityMike2, thanks so much for this post - I love the original image, and appreciate having so, so much more history and context now.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 12:30 AM on January 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Thanks a lot for this, as this strikes me as an important point of record, at least for me, as I've seen the latter hundreds of times, and have never seen the former.

It is also a bit sad, because the first one strikes me as a much more powerful piece. I'm completely uneducated when it comes to painting, and I'd absorbed the idea that Norman Rockwell is not a "serious" painter, but his Rosie the Riveter really raises his estimation in my eyes.
posted by Alex404 at 12:32 AM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Norman Fucking Rockwell!
posted by chavenet at 2:25 AM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

rosie's history is much more complicated than that

and here's a music video of the smoothies doing their hit 1943 renditon of rosie the riveter
posted by pyramid termite at 2:34 AM on January 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

Thanks for the additional links everyone…unfortunately (but not really cause Facebook) all I can see is “Log into Facebook”.
posted by NervousVarun at 3:20 AM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter is in the collection at Crystal Bridges museum in Northwest Arkansas. The first time I got to see the painting, it was in the middle of a large hall and on the opposite side of a display wall in the center. I walked around the side, and there was an older man wearing a WWII veteran cap standing there looking up with this amazing look on his face. I sidled up next to him and just said "Ohhhh" when I saw her. He reached out and took my hand. Tears in his eyes, he said, "Isn't she something." "She sure is," was what I managed to choke out. And then he told me about his late wife and the work she had done.

She's glorious, y'all. As with most paintings, the photos just cannot convey what it's actually like. First, it's a really big painting. All of the detail. All of the strength. She glows.

All while eating a sandwich and stomping on fascism.
posted by lilywing13 at 3:29 AM on January 21, 2022 [25 favorites]

I dunno. The Rockwell is vastly more complex and sophisticated (possibly even a little pretentious with the largely meaningless allusion to Isaiah - I suppose it’s just a way of humorously adding grandeur), while the Westinghouse is simple and direct. The former is unquestionably a better picture but perhaps the latter is a more effective poster. To describe the latter as traditionally feminine and explicitly capitalist is surely nonsense. Traditional females did not wear overalls and flex their muscles, and the image actually resembles Communist propaganda posters more than the usual capitalist fare.
posted by Phanx at 3:34 AM on January 21, 2022 [15 favorites]

So if Wikipedia is correct, the OP article is wrong. The poster is the original (1942) and Rockwell's came a year later (1943). And the muscular depiction was an artistic choice based on Isaiah (Rockwell apologized to the model for changing her looks), not because she was less "traditionally feminine."
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:19 AM on January 21, 2022 [10 favorites]

Debates over Rockwell are always interesting. There was a major one back in 2000/2001 when the NY Guggenheim museum scheduled an exhibition by him to occur in November of 2001, which seems almost unexpectedly and bizarrely apt given the nature of the debates over Americanism, sentimentality, and meaning in his works. Those criticizing and celebrating them going back and forth over what values were being represented by Rockwell and the Guggenheim in the exhibition, both in aesthetic and cultural terms, where money, class, and taste were set out and then shifted back and forth as debate as so much about what those ideas even mean.

If I were to give a glib summary on it all, I'd maybe say that with Rockwell paintings there's nothing not to like. Which can be seen as both rewarding and indulging of his audience in turns, with Rockwell himself even being ambivalent about it quite often. But in his most successful polemic works he turns that same idea on the viewer, as in The Problem We All Live With, showing Ruby Bridges on her way to school with the heavy suggestion of threat surrounding her. The painting uses the same nothing not to like quality that informed his barber shop and soda fountain scenes, but twists it towards the white reader of Look as if to shame anyone who thought otherwise, something that applys to the Rosie painting as well, though obviously to a different end.

(One of his more amusing works is The Connoisseur, where he turns that attitude more ambiguous, showing a man contemplating a Jackson Pollock painting, which Rockwell himself made in Pollock's style, even turning it in and winning competitions with it under an assumed name. There was a PBS American Masters episode on Rockwell that I remember liking from that time, couldn't find a link to the show, but there are videos and transcripts of the interviews they conducted for it here. A transcript of a more condensed take on the debate from PBS's Think Tank here. And an interesting article on Rockwell's painting Doctor and the Doll from the AMA Journal of Ethics, which touches on why some of the debate over Rockwell's work has some reach to it. There's a lot of other more heated takes too you can find by searching if you're interested.)
posted by gusottertrout at 4:27 AM on January 21, 2022 [15 favorites]

Huh. Despite always knowing that she was based on Rosie the Riveter, I never made the connection between Rosie from Lumberjanes and Rockwell's Rosie until now.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:33 AM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

A great painting. I'd only seen the famous poster up until... 7? 10? years ago when I started getting more seriously into painting (doing and appreciating). People get down on Rockwell because of how his work has been used, but he himself was an interesting painter. He's one of the painters of his era in his vein who left behind what amounts to extensive working notes about how he painted. And, just like any painter who produces a huge body of work, much for commercial use, some pieces were far more fully rendered than others (and often the "sketchier" ones are at least as good!).

To gusottertrout's point, I saw a Rockwell show last year at the Museum of the Shenandoah. It was the most concise statement of his breadth of skill and product and change over time! I'd seen individual pieces, but never so many at one go. Oodles of Saturday Evening Post cover repros, but you could also see him experimenting later in his career, with composition and also with textures, the latter of which just don't reproduce super-clearly.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:53 AM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

A while ago I wrote a song for Norman Rockwell’s Rosie.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:13 AM on January 21, 2022

As a high school industrial technology teacher, I’m always looking for ways to signal to my students that the skilled trades are for more than just white, working class boys. Gonna have to track down a poster of this one.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 6:31 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

To me, what makes the poster Rosie “more traditionally feminine” than the original is that Original Rosie’s FACE IS DIRTY. Besides, Original Rosie is way more pumped than Poster Rosie, and Poster Rosie has severely plucked-and-penciled eyebrows.

Rockwell is to painting as Stephen King is to literature: people are forever arguing about whether he represents commercial silliness or Real Art.
posted by scratch at 6:44 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wow, cool! But also wow, gross, Westinghouse Electric fuck you.
posted by Glinn at 7:24 AM on January 21, 2022

I think the important thing to remember about Rockwell is that he worked mostly as an illustrator, and a good deal of his work was done for magazine covers. Even his hang-on-the-wall art is largely illustrative in nature.

And that’s key to the difference between the two Rosies. The more famous of the two is graphic and direct because it was intended as a poster in the first place. It was intended to be seen and reacted to.

Rockwell’s work, otoh, has always been meant to be viewed and considered. It’s an entirely different school of design.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:05 AM on January 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

well this is a great topic and great thread and it's Friday
posted by elkevelvet at 8:10 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

@Phanx - I’m tending towards your interpretation of the mode— painting vs graphic—as explaining a lot about the social spread and general interpretation of the image.

The graphic version is simpler and creates a perception of primary or having preceded the painting. The graphic image contains the essential elements and nothing more, and is therefore more instructive for how a person may become Rosie (and for this reason I think a memetic interpretation is also interesting here.)
posted by xtian at 8:17 AM on January 21, 2022

I do not share the assumed confusion, although I'm glad for the enlightenment provided by this post. Rosie the Riveter is easily identified, as she's pictured with her tool. The more traditionally feminine one is the "We Can Do It" girl.
posted by Rash at 9:22 AM on January 21, 2022

thanks to pyramid termite for posting the Wikipedia entry.. if you did not click the link, don't miss out on this glorious photo of a "Rosie"

beautiful
posted by elkevelvet at 10:40 AM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

the Rosie comparison

Thank you for that one. I had missed it. And I would have totally missed Rockwell's Rosie using mien kampf as a footrest.

Great stuff.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 11:19 AM on January 21, 2022

I don't know as the OP is saying anything about who came first

The word original is used twice in the first paragraph to refer to Rockwell's. To be fair, there's some ambiguity there since the name Rosie wasn't associated with the poster, and in that sense, Rockwell has the original Rosie, but that context isn't made clear.

The author also implies (though again ambiguously) that Rockwell's image is more "queer" as if you have to have a non-traditional body type to be queer, which is sort of a stereotype as far as I'm concerned.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:34 AM on January 21, 2022

I wonder if the comment at the bottom of the Facebook page is newer than the MetaFilter post, so in case some haven't seen it, it debunks one of the author's main points. The Wiki page about "We Can Do It" sums it up even more tidily:

Rockwell's emblematic Rosie the Riveter painting was loaned by the Post to the U.S. Treasury Department for use in posters and campaigns promoting war bonds. Following the war, the Rockwell painting gradually sank from public memory because it was copyrighted; all of Rockwell's paintings were vigorously defended by his estate after his death. This protection resulted in the original painting gaining value—it sold for nearly $5 million in 2002. Conversely, the lack of protection for the "We Can Do It!" image is one of the reasons it experienced a rebirth.

I agree that "We Can Do It" is a little more of the traditional "femme" image, because she seems to have a thinner waist and you can see that Rockwell's Rosie has a beefier neck. So maybe the culture would have chosen her anyway. Nevertheless, if we're speculating why the public might have preferred "We Can Do It", we might look at the attitudes displayed by the two women. Rockwell's seems to say "Fuck if I care", while "We Can Do It" definitely expresses "Nothin' gonna stop me". You might say that either one shows a "cool" attitude that defies the expectations of femininity, but "We Can Do It" might have been the attitude that people were more interested in putting on their T-shirt or whatever.
posted by polecat at 12:11 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

Looking at the two images:

The Rockwell image is certainly more interesting, with it's less standard depiction, more details - and I'm fascinated by the references to famous pieces of art. But it's also a bit more passive - Rosie is relaxing, eating her lunch and (critically) not looking at the viewer. She's resting proudly, but quietly.

The Westinghouse image is more arresting, more of a call to action: the image itself is simpler with fewer details (thus more iconic, more easily reproduced), and the woman is looking directly at the viewer with a challenging expression. She's calling to you, challenging you to do something.

The Rockwell painting is better art, but the Westinghouse is better propaganda, and better for a protest sign.
posted by jb at 2:27 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

These are all great links, thanks. For me, the argument about whether Rockwell is art or not is decisively answered in the affirmative by Murder in Mississippi. I saw it at the Dayton (OH) Art Institute in a traveling exhibition, and it literally stopped me in my tracks. https://www.nrm.org/2020/06/norman-rockwell-murder-in-mississippi/
posted by postel's law at 4:55 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Lakes, thank you for that fantastic link!
posted by sepviva at 5:39 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I like Rockwell’s painting, but I usually do. I don’t see one or the other as “less traditionally feminine,” but I guess the article would have nothing much to say if they didn’t make that claim. They look like two takes on a similar theme to me.

Thanks for the post, I’d have never seen the Rockwell otherwise.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:43 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

merchandise from the Rosie the Riveter national park depicts a BIPOC woman with the caption "we did it!" Numerous panels and displays on-site discuss the contributions women of all races made to the war effort.
posted by brujita at 9:07 PM on January 21, 2022

(The arguments made in the Facebook post, and in the article that author references, lack specific evidence and seem a bit stretched to me. It's not like in 1980 feminists voted and then the TERFs foisted Westinghouse Rosie on us over Rockwell's. The image resurfaced and was reproduced in places like Smithsonian Magazine that aren't specifically feminist, then was was later utilized in rather shallow female empowerment images, along with like, ads for soap or whatever.
Second wave feminism was ending or over at this point so a bit weird to claim that second wave feminists are somehow responsible for the Westinghouse Rosie overshadowing Rockwell's. Also, neither image is especially radical in its reimagination of women. They're both war industry propaganda that promote a type of female gender presentation that was consistent with the needs of the state during an employment crisis and a war. I do think it's interesting to look at the two side by side though, and to notice the different messages and symbology. )
posted by latkes at 12:09 AM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Rosie is relaxing, eating her lunch and (critically) not looking at the viewer. She's resting proudly, but quietly.

And using Mein Kampf as a footrest.
Although penny loafers aren't the best footwear for factory work.

Per Wikipedia Rockwell based Rosie's pose on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel painting of the Prophet Isaiah.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:38 AM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Disinterest in the viewer’s gaze is a traditionally unfeminine part of the Rockwell painting that delights me.

I am not delighted by claiming that muscular dirty women in overalls were unattractive to second wave feminism specifically. The Lego ad! Women’s bike repair collectives! "Carol and / her crescent wrench / work bench / wooden fence / wide stance ", &ff.

I am resigned to pop culture confusing the commercialized attacks on any period of feminism with the feminism itself. I suppose historians will figure it out after everyone involved is dead and has stopped talking.
posted by clew at 1:18 PM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

One of the more uncomfortable conversations I've ever had was when my Irish friend was visiting, and we went to the Brooklyn Museum; they had a Norman Rockwell exhibit, and among the works there was his The Problem We All Live With - and my friend asked me to explain it to her.

Those of you who think Norman Rockwell wasn't an artist - you go take a look at that painting and then think about how you would explain it to someone who asked "what's this about?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:26 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]