The Saturday Evening Post publishes the first of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms in support of United States President Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address theme of Four Freedoms.
The Four Freedoms is a series of four 1943 oil paintings by the American artist Norman Rockwell. The paintingsFreedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fearare each approximately 45.75 inches (116.2 cm) 35.5 inches (90 cm), and are now in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The four freedoms refer to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's January 1941 Four Freedoms State of the Union address in which he identified essential human rights that should be universally protected. The theme was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter, and became part of the charter of the United Nations. The paintings were reproduced in The Saturday Evening Post over four consecutive weeks in 1943, alongside essays by prominent thinkers of the day. They became the highlight of a touring exhibition sponsored by The Post and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The exhibition and accompanying sales drives of war bonds raised over $132 million.This series has been the cornerstone of retrospective art exhibits presenting the career of Rockwell, who was the most widely known and popular commercial artist of the mid-20th century, but did not achieve critical acclaim. These are his best-known works, and by some accounts became the most widely distributed paintings. At one time they were commonly displayed in post offices, schools, clubs, railroad stations, and a variety of public and semi-public buildings.Critical review of these images, like most of Rockwell's work, has not been entirely positive. Rockwell's idyllic and nostalgic approach to regionalism made him a popular illustrator but a lightly regarded fine artist during his lifetime, a view still prevalent today. However, he has created an enduring niche in the social fabric with Freedom from Want, emblematic of what is now known as the "Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving".
The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. It was issued weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influential magazines within the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached two million homes every week. The magazine declined in readership through the 1960s, and in 1969 The Saturday Evening Post folded for two years before being revived as a quarterly publication with an emphasis on medical articles in 1971. As of the late 2000s, The Saturday Evening Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which purchased the magazine in 1982. The magazine was redesigned in 2013.