Judging Rockwell by His Covers

The best part of “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” comes midway through the show, after we’ve been through two rooms that introduce some of the ways in which the famous Yankee illustrator went about creating his reassuring visual narratives. A long, tall gallery wall, the biggest one in the San Diego Museum of Art’s temporary exhibition galleries, is covered with row after row of Saturday Evening Post magazine covers--not the paintings Rockwell made to be reproduced on those covers, but the actual covers themselves, neatly framed and behind glass. There are 322 covers in all, many still bearing a mailing label printed with Rockwell’s address in Stockbridge, Mass. Suddenly, what had been a rather dry and ponderous presentation springs into energetic life.

The Rockwell retrospective opened noisily at the High Museum in Atlanta a year ago and now it’s midway through a national tour, which will culminate next November at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In the hubbub swirling around the controversial and popular show, which chronicles an artist who has always been adored by a general audience but largely dismissed by the art public, it’s been easy to lose track of Rockwell’s art.

Rockwell’s achievement as an artist is not found in the 58 oils on canvas that fill the seven galleries of the show, which has been organized according to a variety of themes (“Inventing America,” “Celebrating the Commonplace,” etc.) rather than chronologically. The oil paintings are steps along the way toward making the work of art, like a photographer’s negatives or a printmaker’s plates. They’re obviously central to the artistic process, but they’re not the main event.

Rockwell’s actual art appears on the printed page, on that jampacked wall of rambunctious magazine covers, with their lively little stories of everyday events aggressively competing with one another for audience attention. The effect is heightened by the display’s loose similarity to a magazine stand. The artist’s genius was in knowing how to get from pencil and paper to oil on canvas to translucent inks on paper, all in a way that would make that cover sing out, Pick me!

The first Saturday Evening Post cover Rockwell illustrated set a standard he would elaborate for the next 50 years. Dated May 20, 1916, the picture shows three young boys, two dressed in sand-lot baseball garb and cheerfully razzing the third, who is dressed in a Sunday suit and bowler hat and pushes a wicker baby carriage (a glimpse of red bootee and frilly bonnet suggests the unseen baby is a girl). A look of glum humiliation marks his furrowed face. The three are stock characters from American literature--think Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn torturing goody-two-shoes Sidney or, later, assorted cinematic Dead End Kids and Little Rascals. Rockwell has fitted them to his time.

Nearby, the painting that formed the basis of the cover shows some of how he got there. On the canvas, whose background is white, the carefully rendered boys exist in an abstract and undifferentiated space. Two parallel black bars run horizontally across the painting near the top, just behind the three boys’ hats, providing a graphic illusion of shallow layering. The bars also help to pin the picture to the flat, white, abstract surface.

As art, the painting elevates ordinary childhood cruelty to the stature of endearing moral philosophy. But that doesn’t happen on the magazine cover. There, the addition of the words “Saturday Evening Post” above the nameplate’s regular black bars helps to dramatize the scene. Is there a story about the scenario inside? Does it represent a current social issue? How are we to feel in relation to the subject?

The flattened picture pops into shallow relief, more like a carved antique Roman marble than a two-dimensional painting. The white space is transformed from a gauzy abstraction into the physical stuff of a magazine page, which can be held in the hands, turned and even thrown away. The translucent colored inks of the printing process allow light to pass through and reflect off the page, further adding subtle animation to a scene that, in tightly painted oils, reads as static and inert.

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The difference between the painting and the cover is like flicking on a light switch. The painting’s solemn celebration of ordinary childhood meanness is lifted out of the queasy realm of high-minded morality, where it grates against individual memory. It lands instead in the raucous commercial sphere, where competition, change and the lively fight for civilizing order are played out in modern mercantile society.

In 1916, when Rockwell painted “Boy With Baby Carriage,” the United States was reeling from the pressures of extraordinary social forces, including massive immigration, the final transformation of a rural nation into an urban one and the end of international isolationism as Europe dissolved into the unspeakable horror of modern warfare. As fear rose, heels dug in.

The ability of the country to survive these pressures--literally a test of national strength--gave rise to organizations like the Boy Scouts of America, where virtue resided in teaching youths a nostalgic re-creation of frontier skills, from tying knots to building campfires. The Scouts were established in 1910; in 1916 the organization was granted a charter by the U.S. Congress.

At exactly that moment, the topical subject embodied in Rockwell’s first Saturday Evening Post cover is the feminization of American society. He shows a boy being mocked as a sissy for assuming an established maternal role. The artist, with his sharp eye for telling detail, even tucked a modern baby bottle into the pocket of the boy’s civilized suit jacket, creating an industrially fabricated version of a nursing mother’s nipple and breast.

In short, the iconic painting makes me wince. The disposable magazine cover, with its emphatic topicality about the passing scene, at least allows for hope.

Rockwell’s work remains essentially unchanged for the next five decades. Topics come and go, ending with his final Post cover of Dec. 14, 1963 (a somber memorial portrait of President Kennedy). The Post was one of the first magazines to break out from a specialized niche into wide circulation, helping to invent the mass culture that surged in the 1920s. Rockwell, like a surfer riding a long and lovely wave, rode the mass-culture crest with barely a misstep. Given his uncanny ability to organize a convincing picture for the printed page, he became the single greatest illustrator of America’s Industrial Age.

All waves eventually crash on the shore, of course, and Rockwell’s was no exception. It took a while, but TV killed it. In the explosive new era of electronic imagery, handwrought illustrations put at the service of mechanical reproduction looked slow and old-fashioned. Photographs quickly bumped illustrations from cover after cover. There’s poignancy in the show’s final picture, a leaden 1969 oil painting of American astronauts landing on the moon--an astonishing event witnessed live on television by millions, but here rendered frankly ludicrous.

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Something of that pomposity infects all of Rockwell’s paintings, while it’s always thankfully missing from the magazine covers. Perhaps that’s because his narrative stock in trade as an illustrator was always the same: the extraordinary power of ordinary experience. Magazine covers embody that mundane quality by their very nature, but oil paintings in gilded frames hanging on art museum walls just don’t. Like the subjects he depicted in his pictures, Rockwell’s own practice as an artist invested the ordinary experience of magazines with extraordinary power.

Why is Rockwell being reconsidered today? Credit the culture wars of the past dozen years. By that I don’t mean that he represents the triumph of conservative repression. The issue is much larger than that, and it has a particular aesthetic dimension.

Until the 20th century, virtue was inseparable from any American notion of good art, just as it was in Europe since the Renaissance. The rule was that all art must be moral.

Then, the world changed.

One of Modernism’s great achievements was to cut art loose from moral significance, from assessments of its representations of virtue and its seamless fit with public expectations. But the challenges to Modernism launched in recent decades have returned virtue and moralism to the center of discussions about American art, regardless of where the speaker stands along the political spectrum.

Artistically we’ve taken two steps forward and one step back. And when we stepped back, there was Norman Rockwell, a contradictory American artist of the 20th century for whom conceptions of virtue were inseparable from successful art all along.

* “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People,” San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, (619) 232-7931, through Dec. 31. Daily, except Thanksgiving and Christmas.