The formative life experiences of four acclaimed artists are captured in galleries at Stockbridge’s Norman Rockwell Museum in an exhibition running through May 25.
James McMullan, whose illustrated images range from U.S. Post Office stamps to a cornucopia of picture books, displays images regarding his interrupted youth in 1930s China.
Frances Jetter, known for her graphics for The Nation, The New York Times and Time magazine displays the tragicomic artwork of a book describing the struggles of a New York garment union.
Expatriate Brit David Macaulay, the author of more than two dozen investigative books (The Way Things Work, etc.) intensively explores the unique ship that brought his family here when he was eleven years old.
YuYi (pr. “Ju Ji”) Morales, the author of numerous picture books, presents her most recent work Dreamers, a rendering of her early experiences in America.
The third generation of British subjects living in Chefoo, China, James McMullan knew snatches of Mandarin by the age of 6 years old. The son of an attaché who, in his spare time, produced musical revues for the English and American colonists, life in this exotic culture seemed close to idyllic.
In 1937, however, the Japanese invaded and the 10-year-old and his mother departed on the next-to-last “repatriation” ships. Those colonists who remained lived out the war in internment camps. His father spent those years in duty with the Chinese army.
McMullan then undertook an odyssey of upheaval, traveling to Canada, to Darjeeling, India for an education and then, lastly, to the states.
His career as an illustrator has few parallels. He has written and illustrated children’s books, created images for periodicals and for more than 30 years his watercolors have served as posters for New York’s Lincoln Center Theater. An image he created for New York magazine became the inspiration for the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever.”
For decades, he left memories of his unsettled youth unexplored. In defining himself as an adult, he wrote that his “anxieties and enthusiasms are the underground river, always bubbling up in the tone of what I draw and paint.”
Spurred by reading wartime correspondence between his mother and father, McMullan began a year’s work to detail that period that later claimed his father’s life.
His 2014 illustrated book “Leaving China” (Algonquin Books, 128 pages, $18.50) is rendered in watercolors, an unforgiving medium and his favorite.
“I’ve been fascinated with watercolor because people think it’s so unreliable,” McMullan said on opening night. “I like the feeling that it keeps me on edge. Watercolor is a medium of risk.”
The illustrator has no interest in returning to his native land.
“Travel doesn’t really hold much glamour for me,” he said. “It seems fraught with memories of hard times. I want to center myself. I want a home.”
A comic once noted that, prior to his immigrant parents arriving at Ellis Island, they were told that the streets were paved with gold. Upon arrival, they found that the streets weren’t paved. Rather, they found that they were expected to pave the streets.
The harshness of immigrant life in the ‘new world’ is brought home by Frances Jetter’s upcoming limited edition book “Amalgam.” A longtime instructor at New York’s School for Visual Arts, she’s a second-generation American whose Polish grandparents came to this country in 1911. The book, rendered in the time-consuming work of linoleum block cuts, details her grandfather’s membership in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. At one point the union had 360,000 members and 75 percent of the nation was clothed by New York workers.
During an opening night interview, she said that her strong social and political views derived, in part, from her family’s stories.
“The whole idea (was) of unions and fighting for what my grandfather thought was fair,” she said. “He even committed acts of sabotage when there were sweatshops and workers had to work seven days a week and still not have a living wage.”
Her grandfather was much loved, but eccentric. He forbade his children from having toys, keeping a pair of roller skates squirreled away behind books. Jetter documents her uncle discovering the skates and within moments wheeling laterally and breaking his arm. His ever-helpful sister applied Mercurochrome to the protruding bone.
The skates are on view as well as the heavyweight, outsized shears that her father wielded as a cutter. Virtually the entire family was involved in the clothing industry and Jetter recalls a great aunt who “struggled with the onslaught of garments.”
Underlining the nightmarish volume of work, Jetter conjures up the image of Charlie Chaplin becoming overwhelmed by monotony in the film “Modern Times.”
There is humor, yet there is tragedy. A graphic of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took the lives of 146 garment workers, notes that Francis Perkins witnessed the event. As were so many, she was horrified. Her vocation as an advocate for laborers’ rights became a career. She became our nation’s first female Secretary of Labor.
The graphic images and the stories they tell are playful and profound, beginning with her ‘old world’ grandparents attempting to assimilate into the ‘new world’ unspooling to her family life in the early 1960s.
Jetter has worked on the oversized book for almost 10 years.
“It grew and it became larger and more complex,” she said. “The idea of being pro-union when now there’s so much anti-union activity is very interesting to me.”
At last count, David Macaulay has written and illustrated over 30 books and, but for an epiphany in his early 20s, none may have ever existed. He graduated with an architect’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Spending a summer in an office, he learned a new definition for oceanic tedium while using plastic templates to design toilets, stalls and sinks for a high school.
“Halfway through, I had this revelation that crystallized. Clearly, this was not going to be an opportunity,” the illustrator said on opening night. “I just shied away from the profession for all the right reasons.”
What the profession taught him, however, was the importance of intense study and that “the key to a good design is designing a good problem.”
Intense study to the point of obsessive-compulsiveness fills a gallery detailing his most recent book “Crossing on Time” (Roaring Brook Press; 128 pages, $22.49).
When a boy, he and his family departed England for the states, sailing on the fastest ship of its class, the SS United States. Launched in 1951, it cost $79.4 million to build and its steam turbines could manage an average speed of 35.5 knots.
The ship, 990 feet in length, was retired in 1969, unable to compete with the growing affection for fast — if monumentally cramped — jet travel across the Atlantic. The book is homage to the liner, inspiring the hope that it will one day again be in use.
Today, as Macaulay noted “it’s just bobbing up and down on the Delaware River, across from Camden, New Jersey. It’s the ultimate limbo.”
For years, there have been earnest attempts to resurrect the vessel as a cruise ship or as a stationery casino and hotel. Fundraising continues.
Macaulay’s gallery is encyclopedic as to sketches and illustrations wreathed around a seven-foot model of the behemoth, becalmed upon a frozen sea.
Yu Yi Morales tells her own story of immigration in “Dreamers” (Holiday House; 40 pages, $17), which became an instant New York Times bestseller. In 1994, she crossed the U.S. border with her infant son and nothing more than a backpack.
Her travel to San Francisco was to wed her American husband and make a home for their son, Kelly. Not knowing the language, she was afraid to answer the telephone and was unaware of our often curious social norms. She found solace at a public library and was surprised to discover that books could be lent. She also found friendship with an understanding librarian and learned English by reading children’s books.
The vivid colors of these books made her homesick for her home of Xalapa, Mexico, rich with gardens and close to the sea.
“I realized I could bring those colors to me if I could paint them,” Morales said in a 2014 interview. She took classes at UC Berkeley and, in time, mastered digital artwork.
“Picture books help me find my path and my purpose as an immigrant in the United States,” she said in a recent online museum interview.
Her own books are revelations of bright, dreamlike images. They’re filled with recurrent symbolism such as dogs, which represent faithfulness. Monarch butterflies, which travel thousands of miles from Mexico to our region and beyond, are symbols of journey.
“I want to celebrate what immigrants bring to a new country,” Morales said in the interview. “When they arrive they bring their strength, they bring their abilities …We all have things to say. We all have stories.”
“Finding Home: Four Artists’ Journeys” continues through May 25. The museum is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission for those ages 18 and under is free. Adults admission is $20; college students with identification can get in for $10; admission for public school teachers with identification is free.
Do n Stewart is a freelance writer who lives in Plainfield. He has written for the Greenfield Recorder since 1994.