Stockbridge, MA—May 6, 2024—Berkshire Eagle art critic Jennifer Huberdeau recently reviewed Mystery and Wonder: Highlights from the Permanent Collection. The article delves into the story and backstory of individual artworks to offer readers a personal “tour” of this intriguing exhibition. The piece brings into focus the subtle, layered, and richly atmospheric world of these illustrations, evoking the theme of “mystery and wonder.” The exhibition is up at Norman Rockwell Museum through June 16.

Read the full article here (subscriber-only link) or below.

‘Mystery and Wonder’ highlights illustrations from the Norman Rockwell Museum permanent collection

By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle

STOCKBRIDGE — On the deck of a cruise ship, two partially filled brandy snifters sit next to an uncorked bottle; a pipe rests on a plate next to some correspondence. The illustrated scene is seemingly serene until your eye drifts up to the body, floating face down, in the distance.

As you lean in to inspect the scene, you notice the open letter has a hastily scrawled IOU for $2,000 on it. Is it a clue to who’s responsible for the well-dressed man going overboard?

It may seem a bizarre subject for a painting hanging on the wall of the Norman Rockwell Museum, but “The Prince and the Prosecutor” is just one of several works on view by illustrator Teresa Fasolino, who is widely known for her highly detailed and intriguing mystery novel covers.

You’ll also find seven more of her covers, including those for “Death and the Dancing Footman,” “Death at Blenheim Palace,” and “Death of a Peer” among the 60 works featured in “Mystery and Wonder: Highlights From The Illustration Collection” on view at the Rockwell Museum through June 16.

The show, according to Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, deputy director and chief curator, was designed to highlight works from the museum’s permanent collection.

“We have had many, really terrific works coming into the collection over the years, especially the last few years. We wanted to do a glimpse that would show the variety of work that we have been acquiring,” she said. “Of course, this is a little bit of the tip of the iceberg. Right now, our collection of work by illustrators other than Rockwell numbers about 25,000.

“Some of the collections that come in are rather large. We have a large collection of the work of the cartoonist William Steig. Other collections are very particular. For example, the Tom Woodruff paintings we have [on display in the show] are the two that we have.”

“Mystery and Wonder,” as a theme, she said, works as a platform to showcase a lot of “different styles and different subject matters that people would enjoy.”

“The subject of mystery, I think, is always intriguing,” Plunkett said. “And it turned out we had a lot in the collection that fell under that idea.”

PULP FICTION

Illustrations for pulp fiction — mystery and romance novels — were in high demand in the mid-20th century. Among those on display is Robert A. Maguire’s “The Damned Lovely,” created in 1955 for a book of the same name by Jack Webb.

The illustration features a smoking gun, gripped tightly by a blond, perhaps a secretary, smartly dressed in a white blouse, mid-length black skirt, sensible black pumps. The black line of her nylons runs smoothly up the length of her calf. Is she the perpetrator or the victim, protecting herself? Is she is a state of shock or relief? The only clues the viewer is given are the smoking gun, a broken door she leans upon and the evidence of a scuffle — an upturned chair and other items at her feet.

“Robert McGuire became really well known for doing magazine illustration, particularly fiction, that dealt with mystery stories. He was also a cover artist for romance novels. That continues to be a really robust area for publishing, but now, most romance covers have become photographic,” Plunkett said. “There were a few ways in which women were portrayed in the mid-20th century. One of them was the femme fatale, like this one, and she was extremely strong and able to defend herself or be the aggressor.”

More often, women were portrayed as damsels in distress or objects of desire.

“It really swung the gamut in the way women were portrayed,” she said.

A nearby work, Mort Kunstler’s “[Woman in the Attic], 1959,” an illustration for Male magazine’s March 1959 issue, depicts a woman caught in the act of hiding a lover in the attic. Her lover hides behind a bed in the far corner as her balding husband pops through the attic trap door in the lower right hand corner.

“It’s a great piece. He often used his wife, Debbie, as his model and that’s definitely her,” Plunkett said. “It’s done in blue and black, because at the time, two-color printing was much more cost effective than the full color. Some of the less expensive publications would try to maximize effect for less cost. I don’t think you miss the color here. It’s a very film noir type of thing.”

The illustration, always, was meant to draw the reader into the story.

When it didn’t, in the case of Rockwell’s “Who-Dun-It, 1948,” the work would languish in the artist’s collection.

“Who-Dun-It,” an intended cover for The Saturday Evening Post, never made it further than a color study. The work was a parody of an English murder mystery — the victim and all the subjects in the same room. It was intended that magazine readers would be able to solve the crime from clues found in the illustration.

The cover illustration was filled with actors from 20th Century Fox — Ethel Barrymore, Boris Karloff, Linda Darnell, Loretta Young, Richard Widmark, Clifton Webb and Lassie. But, the work was scrapped when Post staff failed to figure out the culprit and spent more time identifying all the movie stars.

WORKS OF WONDER

But the show isn’t just made up of illustrations for mystery and romance novel covers. There are plenty of works that are filled with wonder.

A hippopotamus, wearing a headdress, dances on petite feet in one of many illustrations by James Grashow in Stewart Edelstein’s “Dubious Doublets.” A wide-eyed Dorothy grips Toto tightly as she clicks her silver shoes in one of the watercolor illustrations from  “The Wizard of Oz” by Thea Kliros. There are mixed-media works by Joan Hall, created for cover illustrations for The New York Times Magazine; illustrations by William Heaslip and Dennis Nolan. There’s even a painting of a jurors’ box, by Julian Allen, that features an all-women jury — a who’s who of mystery writers: Margaret Miller, Mary Roberts, Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and P.D. James.

Among the works is an astonishing piece by Ned M. Seidler, made for National Geographic, visualizes, before the use of computer graphics and digital images, the layers of a sarcophagus found in a Moche Tomb in Sipan, Peru.

“There had been an archeological dig inn Sipan and there was a Moche Tomb found, that was basically untouched, but the problem was it was in decay. The assignment was to show what was in the tomb, layer-by-layer, and visualize for the public what it looked like in its full splendor,” Plunkett said. “He worked with archeologists to understand how things were layered; what was in the layers — whether it was fabric or beautiful neck plates or jewels.

“He had to figure it out and paint it all by hand. It’s incredible.”

Image Credit:
Mort Kunstler, [Woman in Attic], 1959. Illustration for Male, March 1959. Gouache on board. Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Gift of Mort Kunstler. © Mort Kunstler. All rights reserved.