The View from Outside

Abstract

This essay considers Norman Rockwell's Shuffleton's Barbershop, first published on the cover of a 1950 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, as a meditation on the structuring presence of race in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s. After examining the connection between Shuffleton's Barbershop and William Sidney Mount's 1847 painting The Power of Music (a connection that has been made by scholars before me, though in different terms), I examine why this link makes sense to a discussion of race and Rockwell's art from a century later. Framing this discussion within a consideration of the Post's policies, literary and visual tropes for dealing with race, and the culture of Vermont, where Rockwell lived and made Shuffleton's Barbershop, I then suggest how such a reading might impact our understanding of the illustrator's art as a whole. Only as something gestational, not yet fully formed–either as part of the artist's or his culture's consciousness–could the black body find a place in Rockwell's pictorial community in 1950. And still, the effect it has on his art is profound. In Shuffleton's Barbershop, the black presence decenters the Rockwellian idiom, throwing it just slightly out of its usual alignment to acknowledge in some strange way how skewed the idiom was to begin with.