Norman Rockwell - Review

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2001 by Christina Larson

NORMAN ROCKWELL Laura Claridge Random House, $35.00

ARTISTS ELIGIBLE FOR CRITICAL ACCOLADES are expected to wrestle down psychological demons. Scholars pontificate upon Sylvia Plath's, The Bell Jar, Edvard Munch's "The Scream," and even Hendrix's "Manic Depression," but how many art historians peruse Norman Rockwell's "Boy Scouts' Calendar"?

If you thought that the great romanticizer of small-town America didn't fit the tortured-creative mold, Laura Claridge's new biography, Norman Rockwell, will change your mind. Its revelations about the artist's private life, which scarcely resemble his defining Hallmark-card iconography, clear the, way for Rockwell to enter the critics' pantheon of serious American artists. (Of course, the rest of us have long been charmed by his command of posture and facial expression and by his fastidious attention to details.)

Having rifled through Rockwell's family medical records and gossiped with old neighbors, Claridge has turned up the sorry details of the longtime Saturday Evening Post illustrator's personal battles with depression and the alleged suicides of his first two wives. In the upside-down world of art criticism, such exposure seems to be a prerequisite to regarding the painter as more than a two-dimensional workaholic patriot.

Claridge's book, released to coincide with a major Rockwell exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is the latest scholarly reappraisal to resist the decades-old exclusion of commercial illustrators from art history syllabi. She reminds us that making a living as an artist often requires accommodating public taste, and that, unlike today's public, the middle-class Americans of Rockwell's time didn't openly discuss Prozac prescriptions or believe that self-expression was always a good thing.

Norman D-Day

Rockwell was born in 1894, a year before Oscar Wilde's "indecency" trials damned the literary virtuoso's career for offending public decorum. As the second son of a Yankee cotton merchant of English descent, Rockwell grew up in Harlem's Morningside Heights, dropped out of high school to attend art school in New York (financed, just barely, by a paper route and some early pupils). He then worked for a boys' magazine as art editor and cover artist before placing his first cover with the Post in 1916, at the age of 22. Except for a brief stint in the Navy (as a varnisher and painter, third-class) during World War I, he worked as an illustrator for his entire life, mostly in New England, painting 322 covers for the Post, as well as illustrating hundreds of advertising campaigns.

His time at the Post coincided with the magazine's heyday, when it reached more than 4 million households weekly; but by his departure in 1963, the old magazine was wheezing for subscriptions. Rockwell painted in the '60s, but by then, the influence of the illustrators had waned significantly. Before he died in 1978, the commercial viability of the trade had been all but eclipsed by photography and video technology.

A bit like Mark Twain's portrait of all-American boy Tom Sawyer, Rockwell's paintings enshrined certain wholesome archetypes in American consciousness: the good-humored, commonsensical guy-next-door, the industrious shopkeeper, the earnest daydreamer. During his prime in the 1930s and '40s, Rockwell was a mythmaker for the generation of Americans who lived through the humiliation and despair of unemployment during the Depression, and later, the fear and urgencies of World War II.

His "Four Freedoms" paintings, based on a speech by FDR, sold over $100

million in war bonds. In another series of wartime Post covers, he chronicled the war experiences of a fictional character, Willie Gillis, whom Rockwell described as "an inoffensive, ordinary little guy thrown into the chaos of war." The little guy living up to a larger sense of duty is a typically Rockwellian theme, and an idea which resonated strongly with the World War II generation. As proof that the public took Rockwell's art for fact, hundred of letters from Gillises across the country poured in to inquire about the fate of their long-lost relative.

Although he was in tune with the great historical movements of his time, Rockwell seemed aloof from the contemporaneous shifts in high-art sensibility. Born in the era of Pre-Raphaelites painting sentimental images as a form of moral instruction, Rockwell lived to see Modernist philosophy accepted as orthodoxy. While his microrealist technique and penchant for visual storytelling remained almost unchanged from World War I right through the civil rights era, the high art world progressed through Cubism, Fauvism, Bauhaus movement, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Impressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism.

In truth, Rockwell wasn't so much oblivious to these movements as he was unable to achieve commercial success with them. For a brief stint in the late '20s, he studied Picasso, hung Cubist paintings in his studio, and struggled to integrate modernist techniques with his traditional storytelling method during what he later referred to as his "James Joyce-Gertrude Stein period." His efforts were a failure in the eyes of then-Post editor George Horace Lorimer, and Rockwell soon went back to the crowd-pleasing scenes he did best.