Norman Rockwell's gift to us...
PUSSSYKATT
Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People is a serendipitous and
satisfying gift book on several levels.
The subject matter is deeply familiar but cast in new light. Rockwell is in for
a major retooling by the art establishment. No longer disparaged as
old-fashioned, corny or sentimental, the new Rockwell is a definitive narrative
painter whose story-canvases helped express tolerance and other social virtues
in our democracy. He also is a sly wit, a thoroughly complex modern man and a
master among American artists.
Those aspects are explored in Rockwell, which accompanies a major exhibition of
70 oil paintings and all 322 of Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Evening
Post. Now in Atlanta, the show will move across the USA through 2002.
The book offers a plethora of perspectives from 14 contributors - from the
artist's sculptor son, Peter Rockwell, to famed Harvard psychiatrist Robert
Coles to art-world bigwigs such as Thomas Hoving. This mixed bag illuminates an
old favorite. Rockwell is like a tasting menu, as if 14 innovative chefs took
meatloaf and apple pie and whipped up something new and exciting.
Food analogies come naturally to mind with Rockwell. His 1943 painting Freedom
From Want - family at table, sparkling cut-glass dishes of celery and cranberry
jelly, Grandma setting the big, brown bird down in front of Grandpa, etc. - has
become visually synonymous with Thanksgiving. The book gives the political
genesis of the painting (a controversial political commission and wartime
fundraiser) and further describes the work as "a virtuoso use of white-on-white
painting."
Rockwell re-examines another classic, After the Prom (1957). In a soda shop,
two well-scrubbed teens in party clothes face each other while a goofy soda
jerk beams and leans forward to sniff the girl's corsage.
A rumpled, worn veteran in a leather flight jacket observes from the next
stool. A simple scene? Not on your life! Such paintings make Rockwell "the
Vermeer of this nation's domestic history," writes art historian Dave Hickey.
It is the veteran who conveys the painting's message: "This is what we fought
the war for, and the kids are going to be OK." Or as Hickey puts it, "The two
young people, in their whiteness and brightness, float above the floor, sitting
perfectly erect on the pedestals of the counter stools - in one of the most
complex, achieved emblems of agape, tolerance and youthful promise ever
painted."
Beyond such analysis, Rockwell is simply an excellent picture book, a real
bargain for browsing in the harried holiday season. One chapter is devoted to
Rockwell's annual Christmas magazine covers of merry Dickensian carolers and
weary department-store Santas - all painted in July with sweltering live
models. The images helped create the Christmas we know - secular and commercial
but "suffused with intense feelings of religious ritual."
The chapter by Robert Coles on the 1964 Ruby Bridges painting The Problem We
All Live With is intensely moving. Ruby was the first black child to integrate
her elementary school in New Orleans. When Coles asked her what she thought of
the Rockwell magazine cover that made her famous, Ruby said: "That picture is
about me, I guess - and what you see on the news is about the trouble on the
street." Ruby may express the essence of Rockwell's art: He takes the
historical moment and makes it achingly personal.
Readers will find much to like in Rockwell, a fascinating exercise in how
nostalgia, millennial retrospection and broad critical views can open your eyes
to the familiar.
Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People
By Maureen Hart Hennessey and Anne Knutson
Harry N. Abrams, 200 pp
List price: $35
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