Sotheby’s will finally auction off some of Norman Rockwell’s most iconic paintings from his days as a cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post later this year.
While the auction set for Dec. 4 will almost certainly raise millions, it is unlikely to put to rest the long-running controversy over the cherished paintings.
The legal squabbling over the rights to the artwork stretched out for decades — and represented the polar opposite of the bucolic images of Americana that Rockwell painted.
In the end, the three sons of the late Ken Stuart, the Saturday Evening Post art director until 1962, will split millions from the paintings that they claimed were owned by their father and bequeathed to them.
That has some Rockwell art lovers very upset. “It’s just a sad thing when you see it getting auctioned off like this,” said Joan SerVaas, president of the still-surviving Saturday Evening Post, which was taken over by her father in 1971 .
The paintings include 1952’s “Saying Grace,” voted the most popular Rockwell cover ever and expected to fetch $15 million to $20 million. Another classic, “Walking to Church,” could bring in $3 million to $5 million.
Sotheby’s tried to auction off some of the illustrations originally in 2001, but was halted when the successor company to the old Curtis Publishing Co. said that it still owned the rights to the paintings.
Eventually, the Stuart family sued Curtis, the Saturday Evening Post and the SerVaas family and won the rights to the contested paintings in Connecticut federal court.
“There is no question as to the Stuarts’ legal ownership of these works by Norman Rockwell. All of the claims of ownership asserted by Curtis Publishing were unequivocally rejected by a federal court in Connecticut in 2006,” said Sotheby’s.
The Saturday Evening Post, founded in 1821, was at one time the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America, but it fell victim to many of the same forces that claimed Life and Look decades ago.
Careful records were not kept in the chaotic final days and the fear was that many of the possessions were simply walking out the doors of the struggling publishing enterprise, said Joan SerVaas.
In fact, one reason the shut-down magazine moved its archives from Philadelphia to Indianapolis was to stop the disappearance of goods from the publishing empire, according to SerVaas.
The SerVaas family, which had published the children’s magazine Child Life, wanted the Jack & Jill magazine that Curtis was publishing, so it bought stock in the company in 1971, which by then included the shut-down Saturday Evening Post.
The magazine, now published six times a year as a nonprofit entity, was eventually brought back to life in various incarnations by the new owners, though never achieved its former status as a dominant weekly.
By 1986, Beurt SerVaas began to try to track down some of the Rockwell cover art and contacted Ken Stuart, who had long ago left the Saturday Evening Post.
Stuart’s attorney responded, claiming the paintings were rightfully given to Ken Stuart and declined to cooperate with any effort to round them up. Beurt SerVaas never contested the letter at that point, which hurt the counterclaim in court years later.
For the past 18 years, many of the paintings hung in the NormanRockwellMuseum in Stockbridge, Mass., where the museum estimates more than 5.5 million visitors have viewed them over the years.
While the museum carried signs and book postings that supported the Ken Stuart family claim that he was the owner, museum curator Stephanie Plunkett now tells Media Ink, “It is very unclear how Ken Stuart originally obtained the work. We have not come across any letters about how the artwork was obtained.”
According to reports, the Stuart family said that over the years, Rockwell simply gave many of the paintings away — including some to Stuart, such as “Saying Grace.”
They claim that some of the giveaways were even chronicled in the very pages of the Saturday Evening Post in a bylined story by Ken Stuart. In that story, he claimed that Rockwell simply let him have the painting.
Joan SerVaas said, “We never found any letters from Norman Rockwell giving the paintings away, but we did find letters from him trying to recover his art.”
Norman Rockwell sent one letter to Ken Stuart in 1954 asking for his artwork to be returned.
Stuart, at the time still working at the magazine, said he could not return the pre-1954 work because it was owned by the corporation, but he could return the work from subsequent years.
Many of those works ended up in the Norman Rockwell Family Trust.
Ken Stuart died in 1993, and left his estate to his three sons, Ken Jr., William and Jonathan. But two of the brothers — William and Jonathan — claimed that Ken Jr. had manipulated and taken advantage of their ailing father. Eventually, the feuding brothers settled the case out of court.
One of the sons told the New York Times that the reason the sons are selling the “precious heirlooms” now is that their rising values mean the family could no longer afford the insurance costs.
Joan SerVaas isn’t buying that explanation.
“They are in it for the money,” she claims. “I’m sorry we could not preserve the artwork for the Rockwell family.”
And Plunkett at the Rockwell museum still clings to one last hope. “It would be great if some wealthy benefactor won the auction — and then gave the artwork back to us.”