America’s Painter

For the first time since Americans drove Studebakers, smoked Chesterfields and wore Bulovas, the artist of the moment is Norman Rockwell.

He was always the most stubbornly American artist of this American century. He was always the most popular with the hoi polloi. His pictures of apple-cheeked children, broad-shouldered soldiers and beatific Boy Scouts are embedded in the American subconscious, as familiar as Hopper’s insomniacs and Warhol’s recyclables. No 20th century time capsule could rightly exclude a Rockwell or two.

But it’s only now, as this long-bearded century breathes its last, that Rockwell is reaching the critics. For the first time ever, a major retrospective of his work, featuring more than 70 of his oil paintings and all 322 of his Saturday Evening Post covers, will tour the nation. The heralded show, which opened Nov. 6 here at the High Museum of Art, will visit six more cities over the next two years, ending triumphantly--some say appallingly--at that serious center of serious art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Rockwell at the Guggenheim? Seriously?

Seriously.

“Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” is pointedly, preemptively titled. By appealing directly to the common folk, organizers seem to be saying, “Critics need not apply.” So far, however, critics are storming the show, not to bury Rockwell, as they’ve done for eight decades, but to reappraise him.

“Of all the American artists of the 20th century, few have been more miscast than Norman Rockwell,” writes Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in one of 14 glowing essays that fill out the show catalog. “He was one of the most successful visual mass communicators of the century. His work bridged the gap between high and low art.”

His reputation, however, never did. Until his death in 1978, Rockwell was considered hopelessly lowbrow. His attention to detail was meticulous, his brush strokes gorgeous, his canvases done with museum walls in mind. Still, few dared call him an artist. Even Rockwell, at least publicly, dismissed himself as a mere illustrator, too commercial, too whimsical to be taken seriously.

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Now, suddenly, it’s OK to be serious about Rockwell. Go ahead, the new show says, you’re among friends here. No one will call you a rube if you grin and inch closer to that picture of a cop and a little boy sitting at a soda fountain. So what if it’s been reproduced as a jigsaw puzzle. It’s still a sturdy piece of American art, the critics say.

Seriously.

“He’s an enormously influential painter,” says critic Dave Hickey, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who also wrote a catalog essay. “If you went into a museum, and went into a room with pictures from the ‘30s and ‘40s, you could hang a Rockwell in there and it would look fine with the [Edward] Hoppers. It would look better than the Thomas Hart Bentons.”

One reason Rockwell’s critical reputation has suffered, Hickey and others say, was his fundamental good cheer. He didn’t see the world as low, mean or dark. Cynicism wasn’t a color on his palette. Though a patient of famed psychiatrist Erik Erikson, his artistic outlook remained bright. A 1945 New Yorker profile speculated that Rockwell was “incapable of painting a really evil person.”

In a century replete with evil, this was deemed a fatal flaw.

As the century wore on, Rockwell often looked outdated. Just when Hopper was capturing the anguish of American loneliness, Rockwell was painting the family sitting down to Thanksgiving supper, the soldier on leave, peeling potatoes with his ma.

Through the mayhem of modern art, Rockwell plodded ahead, the unswerving Realist. Not for him the art of shapes and squiggles. He continued to glean inspiration from human faces: The pugnacious tomboy beaming about her fresh black eye. The Puritanical umpires squinting at the heavens, trying to decide if a few raindrops foretell a deluge.

Until now, these and other Rockwells have been neatly classified as pure cornpone by the cognoscenti, placed on a par with “Dogs Playing Poker.” (In fact, Brown & Bigelow, the St. Paul firm that mass-produced those canine cardsharps, also made a killing with Rockwell’s Boy Scout calendars.) Even after Willem de Kooning went on record praising Rockwell’s technique, even after Sotheby’s began selling Rockwells as if they were going out of style, so to speak, admiring Rockwell aloud was one sure way to declare yourself mentally and culturally dull.

As far as some critics are concerned, nothing’s changed.

Rockwell was kitsch in his day, they argue, and kitsch he remains. How can you call the man an artist when with each painting he had to consider where the staples would go? Enshrining him in a serious museum? Please.

“It’s very demoralizing for serious painters,” says Hilton Kramer, editor of New Criterion. “But after the Guggenheim put on a motorcycle show, it no longer has that much shock value. Now it’s like a department store. Seventh floor: Lingerie!”

Kramer doesn’t deny Rockwell’s talent. “I think Rockwell is a perfectly respectable illustrator,” he says, “but to mistake that for serious painting is to my mind simply ridiculous.”

There are surprises in this show. A dream-like painting of a boxing match shows clearly the influence of George Bellows. A portrait of Rosie the Riveter playfully recalls the buff biceps of Michelangelo’s Isaiah. A scene of Aunt Ella taking a buggy ride has a cerulean sky straight out of Monet.

But even after seeing the show and enjoying it, some refuse to jump on the Rockwell bandwagon.

“It is a beautiful exhibit,” says Rebecca Dimling Cochran, a freelance critic here and a former assistant curator at the High. “It is fun, and a lot of people will enjoy it. It does not belong in a fine art museum.”

Born in 1894, in New York City, Rockwell painted his first Saturday Evening Post cover when he was 22. He went on to do 321 more, along with hundreds of drawings inside the magazine and ad campaigns for Ford, Jell-O and Crest.

His magnum opus was a quartet of paintings based on the Four Freedoms enumerated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Done at the height of World War II, the portraits sold as a set of posters that raised $130 million for the war effort.

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At the zenith of his fame, when each new cover caused a stir at the corner newsstand, when each calendar drew an estimated 1.6 billion glances a day, Rockwell knew the critics would struggle with his legacy. “The critics say that any proper picture should not tell a story,” Rockwell told the New Yorker. “I say that if you can tell a story in a picture, and if a reasonable number of people like your work, it is art. Maybe it isn’t the highest form of art, but it’s art, nevertheless, and it’s what I love to do.”

In 1953, Rockwell moved his studio from Arlington, Vt., to Stockbridge, Mass., in the Berkshire hills. Stockbridge, now the location of the Norman Rockwell Museum, which teamed with the High to mount this show, became Rockwell’s waiting room. From the small town’s general populace he picked some of his best-known models, among them Anne Morgan, former director of external affairs at the High.

In 1994, Morgan helped conceive the Rockwell retrospective as a fitting way to close out the century, an effective way to satisfy the public’s nostalgic ache. From what she’s seen so far, it’s working.

“I heard somebody going through the gallery,” Morgan recalls, “and they said, ‘You know, I feel like I just visited a bunch of wonderful old friends.’ People are standing in front of these paintings and weeping.”

One of the show’s most avid defenders has been Rockwell’s youngest son, Peter, a sculptor in Rome. Sitting the other day near his father’s “Triple Self-Portrait,” he confessed that, like the critics, he once looked down on his father. “You’re not supposed to take your father seriously,” he said.

The show, however, helped change his mind. “Things I used to look at as sentimental,” he said, “I look at as not sentimental but ironic.”

High officials project the Rockwell show could draw 250,000 people, equaling their most popular shows. Proof positive, diehard critics say, that the museum has “sold out.”

“I’m shocked by the cynicism,” Kramer says, “elevating Rockwell for purely box-office purposes.”

To which Hickey and others only shake their heads.

“If you’re going to sell out, Rockwell’s a pretty good guy to sell out with,” Hickey says. “Rockwell is a popular artist. Duh.”

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* “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” continues at Atlanta’s High Museum through Jan. 30. San Diego Museum of Art Oct. 28-Dec. 31, 2000.

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this report.