There is a powerful and poignant exhibit currently at the Denver Art Museum chronicling the arc of Norman Rockwell’s career as an iconic American artist reflecting an idealized image of the 1940’s/50’s America back onto itself, to a more sober and wisened reflection expressing his alarm for the state of affairs by the 1960’s.

Early in the exhibit, we see his 1934 painting, Barefoot Boy, a shining, freckled lad sitting under a tree, with a PBJ sandwich in one hand and a Coca-Cola in the other. Above this painting, stenciled on the wall is Rockwell’s commentary on his art at the time: “The view of life that I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.” Two rooms over and 34 years later is Blood Brothers, depicting two bloody, dead men, one white, one black, lying in the street in the aftermath of a race riot. Next to that is Murder in Mississippi, capturing the murder of three Civil Rights activists by the KKK.

Somewhere along his journey from painting life as he would like it to be to painting life as it is, Rockwell woke up to his higher calling as a cultural voice with a far-reaching paint brush. Perhaps a part of his loss of innocence came through his experience witnessing the failure of popular adoption of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms initiative, a joint effort between FDR and Churchill to define Allied goals for a postwar world: Freedom of Speech and Worship, and Freedom from Want and Fear. Though his paintings were well received, the Charter and the initiative were flops. Apparently FDR & Churchill (and Rockwell) were ahead of their times. Has there ever been a more dire time for the Four Freedoms than now?

— Parker Johnson.