FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  5/28/2002 CONTACT:
Suzanne Huntzinger
Marketing Coordinator
Phone:  317/633-2070
Fax:      317/633-8841
Email:   shuntzinger@curtispublishing.com

ROSIE THE RIVETER SELLS FOR NEARLY $5 MILLION

 Rosie the Riveter, Norman Rockwell’s famous Saturday Evening Post cover tribute to America’s female factory workforce of World War II, sold for $4,959,500 in less than three minutes at a Sotheby’s fine art auction May 22, 2002, to Elliot Yeary Gallery of Aspen, Colorado.  The sale price breaks a record set in 1996 for the sale of a Rockwell painting when The Watchmaker sold for $937,500 and reflects a major renaissance of national interest in all things Rockwell.

 The Saturday Evening Post donated the painting in 1943 to the U. S. Treasury Department’s Second War Loan Drive to promote the sale of millions of dollars of Victory bonds to help finance the WWII efforts.  Later the Chicago Pneumatic Tool Company hung the painting in its New York shop.  A gallery bought the picture before selling it for $2 million to a private owner, who recently placed it on the auction block.

 Mary Doyle Keefe, a 19 year old, part-time telephone operator in Arlington, VT posed for Rosie.  Keefe was a 110-pound beauty, but Rockwell wanted Rosie to have powerful arms, shoulders and hands to salute women’s substantial wartime contributions, so he modeled the figure’s body on Michelangelo’s Isaiah from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In a 1967 letter to Keefe, Rockwell called her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and apologized for putting her face atop such a hefty body, saying “I did have to make you into a sort of a giant”.

 Rockwell painted over 400 canvases that were published in the Saturday Evening Post and Country Gentleman magazines.  These engaging art images and thousands of others by the best artists and illustrators of the past century, capture the essence of the human spirit and are licensed exclusively by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN, to manufacturers, advertising agencies and businesses around the world.

 Rosie the Riveter has been recently licensed by:

·        Land’s End for their 2002 summer catalog and custom t-shirt

·        San Francisco Music Box Company for musical figurines

·        Islandia International for collector plates

·        Norwood for 2003 advertising specialty calendars

·        Springs Industries for bathroom accessories

·        Atlas Copco for their Chicago Pneumatic advertisement