Norman Rockwell - Review

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2001 by Christina Larson

His contemporaries in the high-art world, many of whom never actually made a living as artists, scorned Rockwell as a "mere illustrator," a wholesome but backward bumpkin who wouldn't know Monet from Manet. In the early 20th century, the art-for-art's-sake movement damned commercial artists to a lucrative, but spiritually vacuous, place on the art totem pole.

But today's art connoisseurs are taking a second look. As New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl says, "Rockwell is terrific. It's become too tedious to pretend that he isn't."

Sex, Drugs and Rockwell?

Popular interest in Rockwell began to revive in 1994, the centennial of his birth and the year after the Rockwell Museum debuted in an elaborate new building in Stockbridge, Mass., where Rockwell lived his last years.

Then a few lonely critics--notably Robert Rosenblum, contributing editor of Artforum and curator of 20th-century art at the Guggenheim, and Dave Hickey, iconoclastic professor of art criticism at the University of Nevada Las Vegas--confessed that they actually liked Rockwell. His originals became hot items at high-end art auctions, with "The Watchmaker" fetching $937,500 at Sotheby's in 1996. Ross Perot and Steven Spielberg boasted of being fans.

In 1999, Atlanta's High Museum of Art collaborated with the Rockwell Museum to organize the first major touring collection of the artist's work, which includes stops at such respected galleries as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim.

Claridge, a former English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, first encountered a Rockwell canvas in 1995 on a family vacation at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Having previously seen only low-grade reproductions on calendars and other memorabilia, she was impressed by his masterly composition and technique. She undertook biographical research and soon found herself caught up in the rising revisionist tide.

She dug through the archives of the Rockwell Museum, spoke with its crusading museum director, Laurie Norton Moffat, as well as with each of Rockwell's three sons. She combed through family medical records and extracted secrets from opinionated neighbors. Unfortunately, she drums up every hint of scandal, while sometimes shortchanging the actual body of Rockwell's work.

In trying to convince the reader that her research fills a critical scholarly void, she has a tendency to overstate her case. Her opening line implies a debate that never occurred: "Norman Rockwell was not sadistic." This line--as well as her dramatic musings--might have worked well in a novel, but in the context of a biography, it seems overripe. For example: "Imagining the family scene where Norman Rockwell undertook his first drawing proves irresistible ... Norman, those intelligent, restless eyes signaling that he thought he could do just as well as his brother, quickly realized that he could do even better." Those restless, intelligent eyes?

Admitting to a crush on her subject in her introduction, Claridge fixates partisanly on the unhappy details of Rockwell's married life. His first wife, Irene, struggled with depression during their 14-year marriage, filed for divorce, and within two years landed at McLean Sanitarium, the New England asylum later home to such famous guests as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. When Irene drowned in her bathtub, rumors of a suicide circulated.