Norman Rockwell insisted that he was an illustrator, not an artist. But in “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell,” art critic and biographer Deborah Solomon looks at him in both lights, Harry Levins said in an article published at St. Louis post-Dispatch.
“She gives him high grades – which might have drawn jeers in the mid-20th century from that era’s art critics, who dismissed Rockwell as a painter of sentimental small-town America, fit only for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. If that judgment was true (and author Solomon expresses some doubt), it hardly mattered to the millions of Americans who looked forward to those covers, with their mischievous boys, their gossiping townsfolk and their barbershop camaraderie.
On the first page of her text, Solomon sums up the Art Establishment’s judgment: “Rockwell? Oh, God. He was viewed as a cornball and a square, a convenient symbol of the bourgeois values modernism sought to topple.”
But in his private life, Rockwell was hardly a cornball and a square. Although he’s remembered as a resident of small-town Vermont and western Massachusetts, he was born in New York City and grew up in a tony suburb. He was married three times (and divorced once), and his second wife underwent a hush-hush abortion in Britain. Many people close to Rockwell wondered whether he was a homosexual. Solomon found nothing to suggest that Rockwell had ever had sex with another man. But she writes, “He demonstrated an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men. From the viewpoint of twenty-first-century gender studies, a man who yearns for the company of men is considered homosexual, whether or not he has sex with other men.”
Solomon finds other issues with Rockwell. He could be jovial one day, moody the next; neighbors never knew which Norman Rockwell they’d find that day. At his easel, he was a fussy perfectionist. He veered from generosity to stinginess, and so on and so forth.
But what memories his work brings back to older Americans, who grew up with such widely known works as the sailor being tattooed with yet another girlfriend’s name … or the Thanksgiving turkey being placed on a crowded table by a smiling grandmother … or the grinning black-eyed schoolgirl waiting to enter the principal’s office. “American Mirror” teems with reproductions of these classics.
Solomon provides insightful little essays to go along with the art. One of Rockwell’s most famous paintings shows an older woman and a boy seated in a blue-collar eatery and saying grace, as tough-looking men at the other tables look on. Solomon calls the piece “a ballet of gazes.”
Alas, television came along and killed off the Saturday Evening Post and Look. Increasingly, Rockwell turned to portraits to pay his bills. The final chapters take on a sad edge as illness and frailty beset Rockwell, who died on Nov. 8, 1978, at age 84.
But — as a stroll through the coffee-table-book section of any bookstore will show — Rockwell’s art lives on. This easy-to-read biography tells us why,” the article said.
