Rockwell Posts Some Gains With Critics

Norman Rockwell, the American illustrator best known for portraying the bright side of human foibles, is the quintessential popular artist whom critics love to hate. So it’s no surprise that “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People”--an exhibition of 70 oil paintings and 322 Saturday Evening Post covers that opens today at the San Diego Museum of Art--has generated disparaging comments during the past year as it has traveled across the country.

“Norman Rockwell is too nice. His sweetness makes your teeth hurt,” Paul Richard wrote in the Washington Post’s review of the show.

New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl put it this way: “The complete absence of mystery in his art makes me sick.”

It gets worse. Jed Perl’s review in the New Republic called Rockwell’s paintings “finicky renderings of puppy love and civic pride.” In the New York Observer, Hilton Kramer wrote that one of the best things about this year’s version of “The Art Show,” a New York trade fair, is “the fact that I didn’t encounter a single painting by Norman Rockwell,” an omission that “must be counted as a contribution to civilization.”

But Rockwell bashing isn’t what it used to be. The tide of professional opinion has turned dramatically and gathered force as the exhibition has traveled from the High Museum in Atlanta to the Chicago Historical Society and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. After San Diego, the show will go to the Phoenix Art Museum (Jan. 27-May 6, 2001), the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. (June 9-Oct. 8, 2001) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (Nov. 16, 2001-March 3, 2002).

While Perl and Kramer attempt to uphold what’s left of the anti-narrative Modernist credo, most of their peers are reevaluating Rockwell as a great painter in the tradition of 19th century naturalism.

Richard’s and Schjeldahl’s zingers were actually counterpoints in otherwise positive reviews. Richard admitted to falling for Rockwell’s art because “his heart belongs to painting--carefully, on canvas, in oils, with a brush” and praised him as “an ambassador for the medium.” Also admiring Rockwell’s ability to paint, Schjeldahl said his “greatness is of a type that hides in plain sight.”

Among other art world heavies speaking up for Rockwell, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman credits him with producing “a people’s history of America during the first half of the century” and concludes: “He reminded people that the little things sometimes matter more than we think, and we could say the same about his pictures.”

An essay by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner in the New York Review of Books stated that the turnabout is unusual because it’s the work of critics rather than artists, who typically champion their forgotten or underrated predecessors. Rosen and Zerner aren’t Rockwell converts, but they treated him respectfully, dissecting his faults in a weighty analysis and complimenting him as “an extremely keen observer of daily life.”

So what’s going on?

For one thing, the time is right to add Rockwell to the canon of American art, critics and curators say. Boundaries between fine art and popular culture are increasingly blurred as Postmodernists disregard old standards and question the notion that good art has to be difficult. At the same time, many art historians now view their discipline within a broad social context.

First to Mount Defense of Rockwell

Still, someone had to get the critical ball rolling. That would be Dave Hickey, who wrote a catalog essay in praise of Rockwell--which was excerpted in Vanity Fair’s November 1999 issue, just before the exhibition’s opening in Atlanta on Nov. 6. An intellectual maverick who often grapples with unlikely subjects, Hickey writes that Rockwell is “a more important artist than his modernist and postmodernist detractors will ever acknowledge, and a more complex artist than his traditionalist defenders are likely to admit.”

Hickey’s influence was crucial, says Anne Knutson, guest curator at the High Museum, who organized the show with Maureen Hart Hennessey of the Rockwell Museum. But even after he had signed on, it wasn’t easy to persuade major art museums to host the show.

That changed in January 1999, when the New York Times Magazine got wind of the exhibition and Hickey’s upcoming essay. All of a sudden, Norman Rockwell was “the hottest artist” of the moment. In a splashy article called “In Praise of Bad Art,” author Deborah Solomon celebrated a vogue for unfashionable art that had taken Victorian fairy paintings to the Frick Collection in New York and would take the Rockwell show on a nationwide tour, with Hickey’s blessing.

She also quoted Robert Rosenblum, a professor of fine arts at New York University who also serves as the Stephen and Nan Swid curator of 20th century art at the Guggenheim, as wishing he could write an essay for the Rockwell catalog. As it turned out, he did--a three-page piece that was added to writings by a dozen other art historians before the manuscript went to the publisher.

“Two days after the article came out, the Guggenheim called and said, ‘We want the show,’ ” Knutson says. Once a bastion of Modernist abstraction, the Guggenheim has come under fire for presenting everything from motorcycles to Armani clothes. Nonetheless, the Guggenheim’s decision had a dramatic effect, she says. “After that, museums that had turned us down started saying, ‘Hey, we are interested.’ A couple of weeks before the show opened, we had everybody from People magazine to the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, PBS and network television morning shows vying to get first dibs on it.”

Art Establishment Changes Its Tune

Knutson declined to name museums that refused the show or recanted, but recalled an “unbelievable” experience. “We thought the show would be popular, but none of us had a clue it would be a really big hit. This has been a singular opportunity to glimpse the art establishment change its tune on a particular issue from beginning to end.”

Reflecting on the phenomenon, D. Scott Atkinson, the San Diego museum’s curator of American art, says that Rockwell--who lived from 1894 to 1978--is being reevaluated in terms of the golden age of American illustration, led by Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and other artists Rockwell admired.

“When Rockwell entered his training, illustration was on an equal footing with landscape and portrait painting,” Atkinson says. “But by the time he began his career, Modernism had begun to change the art scene in America rather drastically. The push toward abstraction was on, and that began to relegate illustrators like Rockwell into a second or third tier.”

Taking the Rockwell show was not a big leap for the San Diego Museum of Art, which has a Populist program, Atkinson says. Nonetheless, it’s an unusual event. “This is one of those rare situations where the art establishment kind of lost out to the populace,” he says. “In that regard, I think it’s refreshing.”

“Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” packed in 242,000 people during its 11-week run at the High, second only to a French Impressionist show that attracted 250,000 but also lasted two weeks longer, Knutson says.

At the Chicago Historical Society, 88,000 visitors saw the Rockwell show, making it the best attended event in the institution’s history. Nearly 274,000 people saw the exhibition at the Corcoran--not a record but equivalent to crowd-pleasers such as Annie Leibovitz’s celebrity photographs.

The San Diego Museum of Art, the only West Coast venue, has already sold 27,200 tickets. “We should have a very popular exhibition here,” Atkinson says. “I have fairly high expectations.”

*

* “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People,” San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park, San Diego. Ends Dec. 31. Mondays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursdays to 9 p.m. Adults, $14; seniors and students, $12; children ages 6 to 17, $5. Tickets: (619) 220-8497.