Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People
In my early teens the Boy Scouts came out with a revised version of the handbook that downplayed woods lore in favor of good citizenship; there was even a laughably vague section about puberty. In Rockwell’s new cover the woods were gone, and in their place were small vignettes featuring cartoony pink-cheeked Scouts happily going about various tasks. I was appalled: how could someone who’d rendered the wilderness with so much feeling stoop to this? Was he that much of a soulless hack?
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Consider Freedom of Speech (1943), based on Rockwell’s memory of a Vermont town meeting at which one citizen had said something “everybody disagreed with . . . and no one had shouted him down.” Rockwell shows a man in blue-collar attire speaking while white-collar types on either side of him listen respectfully. But the speaker looks absurd: his eyes and face are tilted unrealistically upward as he’s apparently seized by a vision; even the lines of his jacket and pants seem to point up. This isn’t an ordinary citizen ennobled–he’s being canonized. Surely it’s true that attendees at town meetings have been inspired or moved to tolerance. But Rockwell excludes the other side of small-town life–ignorance, jealousy, bigotry–until a very few civil rights pictures painted in the 60s.
There’s a similar tunnel vision in The Runaway (1958). A little boy and a policeman are seated next to each other at a lunch counter. Clearly the boy ran away from home; soon nice Mr. Policeman will return him to his loving family. Many stories did turn out that way. But other kids fled from physical and sexual abuse at home, often at the hands of their parents. In Rockwell’s cute, innocuous stories passions never grow much stronger than mild irritation, excluding the possibility that such things could happen–an exclusion that in the culture at large allowed abuse to flourish.
The problem is that this exhibition is trying to make the case that Rockwell’s work is worthy of being hung alongside the masters in a major museum. Yet more than one catalog essayist, after failing to make an aesthetic argument of any substance, falls back on Rockwell’s popularity as proof of his greatness–a strange way to justify a claim of high art. Judy L. Larson and Maureen Hart Hennessey call his art “wise, heartfelt, acute, and intense”–words that might just as well describe grandfather’s anecdotes. Citing his popularity, they write, “Rockwell represented the democratization of American art in an era when critics praised highly sophisticated, introspective expressions.”
In Rockwell’s After the Prom (1946) a boy and girl face each other on soda fountain stools while the soda jerk behind the counter sniffs the girl’s corsage. As Dave Hickey points out in a catalog essay, their white garments form a kind of “clustered burst of white in the center,” suggesting the gentle odor of the girl’s corsage. (Hickey also analyzes the formal balance created by the picture’s diagonals, both visible and implied–an analysis that seems to work much better for the catalog reproduction than for the thickly painted original.) But what we apprehend are predigested emotions and ideas: the girl’s demure pleasure and the boy’s tentativeness.
In perhaps the best of the catalog essays, Rockwell’s son Peter gives an account of those pictures that are explicitly about the process of making or viewing paintings. He even proposes that in Triple Self-Portrait (1960)–which shows Rockwell from behind, in a mirror, and in the self-portrait he’s painting–the artist allows viewers to “construct the meaning” for themselves. But I think Triple Self-Portrait is the painter’s explicit admission of his limitations. To his right are mounted small reproductions of four self-portraits by Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso, and van Gogh. On a narrative level they tell us about the inspiration he seeks while painting. But Rockwell’s skillful imitations of these famous paintings make it clear how much more compelling they are than his own self-portrait, the largest and most visible of his three renditions. Dürer’s long curls vibrate rhythmically; his eyes penetrate. Rembrandt’s eyes have an even greater mystery, and van Gogh’s intense colors are wildly expressive. By contrast Rockwell’s black-and-white self-portrait is humorously bland. Permitting himself the grandest of inspirations, he comes up with an image that’s flat, plain–“hard-working, regular.” In this painting Rockwell himself tells us that, by the standards of great art, he ain’t it.
