Type: Documentary

September 1, 2020 / ExhibitionFour FreedomsFranklin D. RooseveltNorman Rockwell

VIDEO: Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms

In the spring of 1942, Norman Rockwell was working on a piece commissioned by the Ordnance Department of the US Army, a painting of a machine gunner in need of ammunition.

Posters featuring Let’s Give Him Enough and On Time were distributed to munitions factories throughout the country to encourage production. But Rockwell wanted to do more for the war effort and determined to illustrate Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Finding new ideas for paintings never came easily, but this was a greater challenge.

August 18, 2020 / ExhibitionFour FreedomsFranklin D. Roosevelt

VIDEO: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms

Although the nation was not yet at war in January 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used his annual message to Congress to proclaim the Four Freedoms as a de facto war standard to one and all.

It was not until Norman Rockwell painted his Four Freedoms that Americans could really understand what they were fighting for and why the Four Freedoms were so important to the country and the world.

August 15, 2020 / Four FreedomsFranklin D. RooseveltNorman Rockwell

VIDEO: Womanpower: the Fight for the Four Freedoms

Rosie the Riveter emerged as an emblem of the working woman during World War II, the center of a campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for defense industries. Visualized in the early 1940s by American illustrators J. Howard Miller and Norman Rockwell, Rosie represented women who entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during the war as widespread male enlistment greatly diminished the industrial labor force.