Norman Rockwell Reconsidered
A week ago, critic Michael Kimmelman published a long and detailed appreciation of Norman Rockwell's art in the Sunday New York Times.
The essay ran in conjunction with "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People," a national tour of paintings from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts currently on display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta that will end up at New York's Guggenheim Museum in November 2001.
Coming on the heels of Kimmelman's articles championing the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibit, and the strange ouvre of Matthew Barney, the article reflected critical cognitive dissonance on the part of the chief critic of the paper of record.
For at first glance, one asks, how can one love Norman Rockwell and also love Chris Ofili? But then it turns out that Kimmelman far from being alone.
Matthew Collings, author of Blimey! and It Hurts, host of a new BBC series on the history of modern art--the English art critic who knows the Brooklyn "Britpack" best--calls Norman Rockewell "great."
The online exhibition catalog from the High Museum features other prominent boosters, now unashamed to champion the illustrator best known for his Saturday Evening Post covers.
"In American art, there has rarely been a creator of such influence as Norman Rockwell," writes Thomas Hoving, former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "These days, now that the obsession for abstraction has cooled, his achievements are being discovered by scholars. Rockwell is more and more identified'correctly'as a cultural phenomenon, one who made a sea change in the perception of art in this nation."
Art historian Robert Rosenblum is another fan.
"Norman Rockwell keeps pricking my art-historical conscience," he confesses. "We are learning that there are many fresh approaches to Rockwell, even psychological ones.It's a tribute to Rockwell's diverse powers that his art now seems to look in so many directions.Just in time for the new millennium, we may have a new Rockwell..."
And David Hickey tries to bury modernism itself, using Rockwell as a shovel.
"Rockwell's great social painting remains, and Norman Rockwell remains, as well, as a sustaining presence in the public consciousness - a more important artist than his modernist and post-modernist detractors will ever acknowledge, and a more complex artist than his traditionalist defenders are likely to admit," says Hickey.
"During his working career, his pictures were loved and respected not only by the American public but also by artistic spirits as dissimilar as Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol. During the forty years since the zenith of Rockwell's career, the commercial illustrators with whom he competed for jobs have become historical footnotes - as have 99 percent of the modern artists whose work was presumed to be infinitely superior to his - as, in fact, has modernism itself become a footnote."
The tide seems to be turning for an illustrator who not too long ago was lambasted as a cornball phony.
What does this Rockwell revival mean?
First, it is clear that there is a yearning for art that the public can understand, and that speaks to common experiences.
Rockwell's work is easily comprehended by the audience, which is why he was a success as an advertising illustrator and commercial artist.
Rockwell's illustrations are generally amusing or uplifting, and his work fills a role that much contemporary art has abandoned.
Yet a visit to the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts revealed that the real Norman Rockwell was part of a more complicated landscape than one might think, just as America is a far more complex place than it first appears.
And while his considerable talents are evident, there is an uneasy sense that others are trying to use Rockwell for their own ends -- ends which may have little to do with his lfe and work.
For example, although the museum charges a $9.00 entrance fee, there is a huge inscription in the first gallery naming Stephen Spielberg and Time-Warner as patrons and philanthropists.
But if they have been so generous, why the stiff admission charge? The intitial effect is to make one question not only their contribution, but also the museum's displays.
And something is obviously missing. At first it seemed only to be the paintings, most of which had been sent to Atlanta and not replaced. About half of the galleries were closed pending installation of a new show called "Before TV."
But something else was missing, in addition to the art (and mysteriously, a museum cafeteria).
What was missing was a sense of Norman Rockwell, the real man.
Indeed, the precise details of Rockwell's life are pretty much avoided inside the museum.
Instead, the museum features sculptures by Rockwell's son, as well as travelling shows by contemporary artists.
The reconstruction of his studio--moved by the museum from the center of town--seems sterile.
The elderly docent who gave the tour reminisced mostly about how she demanded her son cash the check for $35 Rockwell paid him to be the model for Huckleberry Finn (he wanted to keep it for the signature).
In Stockbridge, it seems from the displays at the museum, Rockwell was appreciated more for his money than his art. His business ledger is on display in the museum in a plexiglass case, like a religious relic.
However, a visit to Stockbridge does shed some light on Rockwell's creativity that one might not find elsewhere. The town is not, in fact, a typical small town.
Although not depicted in Rockwell's paintings on display, or widely discussed by art critics, one discovers on visiting Stockbridge that mental illness played a recurring role in Rockwell's life. Married three times, Rockwell moving from New Rochelle to Vermont to Stockbridge, once setting fire to his studio "accidentally."
And America's favorite upbeat illustrator was hospitalized repeatedly for depression.
In fact, Stockbridge, the town used to depict the archetype of wholseome middle-America in Rockwell's illustrations, is the home of the Austen Riggs Center, a private psychiatric hospital which dominates the center of town.
Although financially successful -- to the point where the entire town seemed to be working as paid models for Rockwell -- the picture one gets from seeing Rockwell's Stockbridge surroundings is of a troubled and moody artist struggling with his own myth, tormented by his own demons, and fighting crippling episodes of mental illness.
Which perhaps explains why Rockwell put small portraits of Van Gogh and Rembrandt into his own famous "Triple Self-Portrait." They were a clue to the mystery of his mental state.
Like those artists, Norman Rockwell must have continually struggled with the fear of madness.
