Americana

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Loughery, John

IN HER BIOGRAPHY OF NORMAN ROCKWELL published last fall, Laura Claridge looks behind the folksy public image America's most beloved artist cultivated (and claimed, at times, to feel constrained by), and the picture isn't a pretty one. Nursing the wounds of an unhappy childhood, Rockwell was an indifferent father; excised from memory an embarrassing "open marriage" in the 1920s to a flighty young woman; grappled for years with depression, his second wife's alcoholism, and unresolved concerns about his own compromises, potential, and need for financial security. The 500-page biography, written by a Rockwell admirer, is a respectable piece of work, but it left me with one overwhelming impression: Would that even a trace of this darkness, selfdoubt, ambiguity-the honest mess of real life-had found its way into Rockwell's art! Would that the man had been brave enough to do without those regular paychecks and put his graphic skills to use for some ends that truly mattered.

We of the anti-Rockwell camp are, if not a verifiable minority these days, an emasculated bunch. The new books by reputable writers, the scholarly attention, the museum exhibitions: the forces of revisionism have a certain unstoppable momentum now that has left some of us wondering if we occupy the same planet as his art-world advocates and academic promoters. We're like unrepentant Nixon haters who can't believe the media reports about an elder statesman and all the graveside accolades; I sit about with that group of skeptics, too, dazed, muttering "Checkers?" "Watergate?" "Cambodia?" to no one in particular. Meanwhile at the Guggenheim Museum-built by Frank Lloyd Wright, the original showcase for Vassily Kandinsky and the great experiment of "non-representational" art-ruddy-cheeked boys will be ruddy-cheeked boys, family members play their allotted roles, and everybody loves everybody. Evil is off-stage and universally excoriated; rebellion and pain are neutralized, and individuality is nonexistent.

Though he could be smarmy and duplicitous about many topics, Christmas, women, and race brought out the worst in Rockwell. I can handle this, if I have to, when it comes to the Yuletide theme; these images were, after all, intended for the covers of popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Look. Had I been around then, I am sure I would have found The Homecoming (an image of a young man returning from college for the holidays laden with presents, his huge family greeting him like a conquering hero), painted for an 1948 Saturday Evening Post cover, or the 1956 The Discovery (a picture of a wide-eyed boy's awakening to the fact that Santa does not exist and that the costume in his parents' bureau is Dad's) to be utterly charming. In the context of mass-market journalism, these are plausible, corny images for their time; fifty years after publication, they are suffocatingly cute and completely inappropriate for a museum exhibition that purports to be concerned with aesthetic rather than strictly sociological concerns. Much more troubling are the depictions of women and girls because one is apt to hear remarks about the artist's concern, unusual for his day, with a less stereotyping view of his female subjects. If that were true, it might add something to the case for seeing Rockwell in a better light, though a lack of patriarchal prejudice does not necessarily make one a serious artist. But what we get with these women and girls is yet more stock imagery, more veiled condescension.

Girl with Wet Canvas (1930) and Girl with Black Eye (1953) tell us that spunky girls can indeed be painters and can fight in the schoolyard and get shiners and smile about it later like the best of the guys, but these rebels are no more than unthreatening novelty acts in the panorama of a wholesome society that can always make room for some ever-so-slight variations in its gender-role patterns. They warm the heart and gloss over the reality of entrenched obstacles and perceptions. The famous, much-honored Rosie the Riveter (1943) is the most offensive painting in this regard. With the biceps and in the pose of Michelangelo's Isaiah, Rosie is a bit of a well-intentioned freak, a rivet gun angled phallically hard across her midsection. But, of course, Rosie is doing her part to defeat Fascism (a copy of Mein Kampf beneath her feet: no symbolism too obvious for Post readers) and, lest we worry that she might indeed be a lesbian (and let's not pay attention to their monumental contributions to the war effort, heaven forfend), the compact and the lace hanky sticking out of her side pocket remind us that she will return to her proper feminine sphere as soon after V-E Day as possible. In art, as in life, trying to have it all ways results in having very little in any way.

Admirers of Rockwell sometimes point to his few tepid pictures about America's racial tensions in the early 1960s as evidence of his mature awareness of the world he actually inhabited. Here, too, I don't feel I am looking at the same works as his supporters. New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967) and The Problem We All Live With (1963), both executed for Look, turn a painful, complex national nightmare into tidy packages of liberal sentiment. In the former painting, the hint of prejudice confronting the black children moving into this lily-white suburb is evoked by a woman anxiously peering from behind her curtain in the distance. The white kids by the side of the moving truck, willing to examine their new peers up-close, suggest that race hatred in God's Country will no doubt be expunged in the schoolyard and on the baseball diamond. In the latter painting, ten-year-old Ruby Bridges in her white dress and sneakers walks between a phalanx of federal marshals (their heads cropped at the top, a tomato landing on the wall behind her), in a tableau that is stiff, stately, impersonal, and formulaic in the glaring black/white color contrasts of Ruby's skin and her apparel. If this was the best oil on canvas could do, school desegregation rightly belonged to the photo-journalists and the more impassioned writers.