A commentary by Tom Carson
In one of Rockwell’s boldest breaks with representational convention, the marshals are painted from their shoulders down — not just faceless but headless. While that doesn’t dehumanize them, exactly — if anything, it makes their determined bearing more eloquent — nothing could better emphasize Rockwell’s understanding that the moment’s emotional truth lay in Ruby Bridges’s solitude. “Of course they were terribly disappointed that I didn’t show their faces,” he would explain years later. “But if I’d shown the four faces, you wouldn’t have seen the little girl.”
Rockwell’s depiction of Bridges was another matter. He chose to darken her skin tone, making it darker, in fact, than that of either Lynda or Anita Gunn. Today, such artistic license — deliberately darkening a subject’s appearance as a way of overemphasizing race and provoking the viewer — would be seen as racially insensitive. But he plainly hoped to disconcert Look’s readers by making her blackness the picture’s central issue. Paradoxically, that also made her unmistakable individuality more arresting.
Except for the somewhat too-vivid yellow of the marshals’ armbands — arguably, the picture’s only flaw — and the almost bridal whiteness of the little girl’s dress, which is one of its masterstrokes, the only patch of color that’s meant to draw the eye is the stain on the wall behind them, the residue of a flung tomato. (“It took me ten tomatoes to look as though it had really splashed,” Rockwell later recalled.) But it’s not as prominent as Problem’s most shocking ingredient today: the all-caps racial slur scrawled on the wall.
With its decapitated marshals and the diminutive Ruby walking in stark profile, the painting is among Rockwell’s most stylized. There is even an artificiality to the way the four bodyguards’ left arms are cocked back so that the viewer can see their badges as well as the court order tucked into the lead marshal’s side jacket pocket. The artist has pared down the actual event to its essential meaning — an atypical treatment for Rockwell, who loved to pack his canvases with incidental detail.
What’s strikingly absent, except by unpleasant implication, is Rockwell’s most durable theme: community. The mob heckling Ruby Bridges is nowhere to be seen, and only gradually does it sink in that it’s because we’re looking at Bridges and her escorts from the mob’s point of view. We can only dissociate ourselves from them by refusing complicity.
