Rock On & Rockwell

Norman Rockwell has been in the news lately. The NY Fishwrap carried a story last week about a reunion of the New Englanders who served as models for Rockwell's paintings that mostly became cover art for The Saturday Evening Post. Even earlier (October 23, 2009), this blog carried a post about Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms — Saturday Evening Post Covers (February-March 1943). A major exhibit of Norman Rockwell's art — “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lukas and Steven Spielberg” — has opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, until January 2, 2011. James Carman is less entranced (than filmmakers Lukas and Spielberg) with Norman Rockwell's (mostly) lily-white universe. If this is (fair & balanced) criticism of simplistic sentimentality, so be it.

[x WQ]
Rockwell's America
By James Carman

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america appeal art artist best boone boy bursting capra carman characters dive exhibit explains filmmakers final found frank girl hickey hung intriguing key life lukas male moment movie note painting purchase quality recent remain reminder rockwell scripts spielberg story storyteller struggles subject used vanity view vision waiting white work young

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"Triple Self-Portrait"
The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1960 (cover)
Oil on canvas (44 1/2 x 34 3/4 in.)
The Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts

I remain on the white picket fence about whether Norman Rockwell is a great artist. But on a recent Sunday, seeking escape from the blistering heat of the Washington streets in a crowded exhibition of the artist’s work drawn from the personal collections of filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lukas, the question seemed almost irrelevant. Rockwell is a consummate entertainer, and the easy appeal of his work remains undimmed more than 30 years after his death.

As critic Dave Hickey noted, in a 1999 Vanity Affair article distilled in our pages, Rockwell possessed “a tolerance for and faith in the young as the ground-level condition of democracy,” a quality that “distinguishes him as a peculiarly American artist.” That explains why so many of his best Saturday Evening Post covers focus on young people: the boy holding his bandaged pooch in the veterinarian’s waiting room, the tomboy besting her male companions at marbles, the pony-tailed girl watching her mother primping at a vanity.

What I found most intriguing about the work on exhibit, though, is the quality that attracted Spielberg and Lukas, who themselves have contributed as much to the cultural iconography of their time as Rockwell did to his. Rockwell’s paintings were not just staged; they were cast, rehearsed, set-designed, and directed as much as any movie, all to capture—in the frozen moment of the final image—a complete story. His pictures were populated with characters that had off-screen lives, their faces bursting with emotion. “The key to Rockwell is that he’s a great storyteller,” Lukas says in a filmed interview that is part of the exhibition, “and he used cinematic devices to tell his story.”

Spielberg enthusiastically explains that he purchased his first Rockwell painting—“And Daniel Boone Comes to Life on the Underwood Portable”—because it reminded him so much of his own struggles to write movie scripts. Spielberg hung his most recent Rockwell purchase, "Boy on High Dive"—in which the painting’s subject peers in terror over the end of a diving board—in his office, as a reminder that only by overcoming doubts can we accomplish anything worth celebrating.

But like many who view Rockwell’s art, I am often left in some discomfort about his larger vision. Lukas places him in the context of filmmakers such as Frank Capra, who, he says, “had that sort of idealistic, fantasy vision of what we wanted America to be, or what we thought America was.” It’s hard not to notice that Rockwell’s America is a remarkably white, homogeneous place. And as I left the exhibit, I couldn’t help but note that the visitors looking at his art shared those same characteristics. Ω

[James Carman is the Managing Editor of The Wilson Quarterly. Carman is a graduate of Cornell University.]

Copyright © 2010 The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.

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