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Our Norman Rockwell and Theirs

By from the October 2010 issue

More on that tiresome left-wing myth of the right-wing myth of the vanished America.

In an episode of The Simpsons titled “Home Away from Homer,” Homer Simpson’s goodie-goodie neighbor Ned Flanders decides to move from Springfield to Humbleton, Pennsylvania — the place where they allegedly make those, you know, adorable figurines — and explains his decision with the typically postmodern comment that “I wish I lived in a place more like the America of yesteryear that only lives in the brains of us Republicans.” Of course, no real-life equivalent of Ned would say such a thing. The supposed nonexistence of “the America of yesteryear” is by now a familiar left-wing trope the whole point of which is that people like Ned are pitifully deluded for believing that it existed in reality and not just “in the brains of us Republicans.” Putting such a self-contradiction into his mouth is thus an implicit acknowledgment by the always cutting-edge Simpsons writers that the myth of the nonexistent American past has itself assumed mythic status by now. How delicious to think that the myth of the myth should henceforth be obliged to don the same quotation-mark epaulettes as the myth itself.

But the news seems to have passed by Mr. Blake Gopnik, whose review in the Washington Post this past summer of an exhibition of the art of Norman Rockwell at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art slammed the long-dead celebrity “illustrator” (as Rockwell called himself) as the perpetrator of “an art of unending cliché.” Mr. Gopnik treats the ur-myth of the wholesome American past as if he has just discovered it instead of something that has now become at least as much a cliché as anything Norman Rockwell ever drew. Indeed, much more so for, in this criticism, Mr. Gopnik appears not to know his own critical business. Rockwell was a sentimentalist, if you like, but he didn’t deal in clichés. His images were not in the least hackneyed or familiar ones at the time he produced them. If they have become so since he created them, that is no more his fault than it is Shakespeare’s for writing what have since become so many familiar quotations.

What the critic appears to mean by “cliché” — which, tellingly, he regards as a “sin” — is an affirmative approach to certain bourgeois American values and sentiments that he, in common with most other “progressive”-minded folk, happens not to believe in. While progressive trashings of those values and sentiments are now commonplace, artistic affirmations of them are pretty thin on the ground these days, yet it is the latter and not the former that are still regarded as clichés in the left-wing backwater of the Post’s arts pages. “The reason we so easily ‘recognize ourselves’ in his paintings,” writes Mr. Gopnik, wielding the quotes with a po-mo flourish, “is because they reflect the standard image we already know. His stories resonate so strongly because they are the stories we’ve told ourselves a thousand times. Those stories couldn’t have been otherwise.”

But this is quite obviously the critic’s contribution to Rockwell’s art and nowhere to be found in that art itself. For those who admire him, Norman Rockwell produces the emotional effect that he does precisely because we know the stories could have been otherwise. The kindly old doctor examining the little girl’s doll makes an impression because his condescension (in the old-fashioned sense) to the child is unexpected. When we see the young man returned from the war trying on his civilian clothes in his boyhood bedroom and finding them too small for him, the poignancy of the moment utterly depends on our knowledge that he might easily not have come back at all.

Of course this doesn’t make Rockwell’s magazine covers great art, but then he never pretended to be a great artist. Mr. Gopnik’s gratuitous attack on this canny, skilled, and immensely successful popular illustrator is not only politically motivated, as most criticism (and most art) is nowadays, but it also has no other purpose than as a simple-minded reiteration of that tiresome left-wing myth of the right-wing myth of the vanished America. He provides quotations from those he amusingly calls “the experts” (because they share his political views), noting that “literary scholar Richard Halpern has suggested that Rockwell’s vision of America is aware of its own gaps, making his paintings ‘not so much innocent as…about the way we manufacture innocence.’ ” Likewise, “the eminent art historian Alan Wallach has dared to see” — I love that absurdly self-congratulatory use of the word “dared” — “Rockwell’s ‘capitalist realism’ as deeply ideological, along the lines of socialist realism.”

This is a mere tautology. To the ideologue, everything is “deeply ideological,” but that has nothing of substance to tell us about Rockwell or what he or his audience thought he was doing.

So, too, the idea of manufactured innocence is an oxymoron, striving for paradox, which really is nothing more than a denial that there is any such thing as genuine innocence, in the bourgeois or “capitalist” understanding of the term, just because it is bourgeois. Those who would thus politicize the arts first seek to persuade you that they are already politicized by the purveyors of “clichés” like Rockwell. But the clichés are only counted — and discounted — as such by the prior assumption that they are somehow untrue and politically motivated, or even untrue because they are politically motivated, never mind that the criticism itself is politically motivated. Another name for clichés as Mr. Gopnik misuses the term is myths, and Rockwell need be ashamed of being a mythmaker no more than Mr. Gopnik’s “experts” are in propagating the counter-myth.

Rather less so indeed, I should say, since the world as it is looks to me more like Rockwell’s than Blake Gopnik’s. That may be only because I find the bourgeois and “capitalist” myths so much more attractive than their glum and nihilistic competitors, but those competitors obviously have their own attractions, since they have so largely taken over the supposedly popular arts since Rockwell’s time. True, the popular arts are now considerably less popular than they were since audiences have become hooked on “reality” TV, but it is still remarkable that affirmations of even the most obvious things (from the bourgeois point of view), such as patriotism, courage, virtue, self-sacrifice, love, religious faith, service to the community, or achievement of any kind are now ipso facto regarded as politically suspect.

MOVIES, LIKE OTHER ONCE POPULAR art forms, are inherently affirmatory, which is why you have to work very hard to produce the kind of cinematic nihilism that Todd Solondz does. His vile Life During Wartime, which had a brief run this summer before sinking without a trace, makes pedophilia stand, as in his earlier film Happiness (1998) to which it is both sequel and remake, for the evil (including terrorism) that is supposed to blanket the world. So uncompromising is it in its sense of despair about the world it represents that you almost have to admire it for contriving, against all odds, to keep anything positive or hopeful out of it. Could that be the sort of achievement that critics like Blake Gopnik and his “expert” colleagues are looking for in art? Affirmation — affirmation of anything — strikes them as cliché because it hints of the bourgeois revival that would make them irrelevant.

Long before even Happiness, there was a movie called Kids (1995) made by Larry Clark and Harmony Korine. Though not a hit by any standards, it was more popular than either Happiness or Life During Wartime. But, like those movies, it failed as a representation of reality. The problem isn’t that horrible criminal and perverted things we see on the screen never happen. It’s that the filmmaker has a responsibility to put them into their proper context — that is to say, the context in which they actually do happen in a world where Norman Rockwell moments, however distasteful to one’s highly developed aesthetic sense, are much more common than pedophilia. In such films, the filmmaker turns away from this responsibility to sensationalize — that is, to portray essentially deviant behavior not as deviant but as the norm.

An article by Jonah Weiner in the New York Times attempts to defend Mr. Solondz’s nihilistic filmmaking by quoting Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the stars of Happiness.

Mr. Hoffman recalled the discomfort he felt on the set playing a character who gruntingly masturbates at one point, phone in hand. “I remember once saying to Todd, ‘People are going to laugh at me.’ Just doing it, there was such a vulnerability that I became really self-conscious. And Todd said, very calming, ‘I think they’re going to feel for you.’ In saying that, he was telling me, ‘I want you to find a way to feel for him.’ He has huge empathy for these characters. He’s not sitting there judging them.”

But maybe that’s the problem. To meet such people on their own miserable terms instead of judging them is to accept the reality of their hellish worlds and so miss out on both the perspective and the hope that judgment would bring. 

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (34) |

Bill Lannon| 10.29.10 @ 6:59AM

I recall a movie in the early '50s called "The Window." I and my friends growing up in NYC at the time were terrified by the film because many of us had, in fact, slept on the fire escape during hot summer nights. We could easily imagine witnessing bad things such as those in the film and being terrorized as a consequence.

I therefore find Mr. Bowman's assertion that "... the filmmaker has a responsibility to put them into their proper context -- that is to say, the context in which they actually do happen in a world where Norman Rockwell moments, however distasteful to one's highly developed aesthetic sense, are much more common than pedophilia" rings entirely true.

For if we are to accept the demons and evildoers in popular literature, bourgeois symmetry surely demands that Santa Claus and Norman Rockwell be allowed an appearance as well.

Alan Brooks| 10.30.10 @ 5:27PM

" [snip] surely demands that Santa Claus and Norman Rockwell be allowed an appearance as well."

Nowadays it is Long Dong Silver and Marilyn Chambers.

Pepe Le Pew| 10.29.10 @ 7:56AM

Pepe Le Pew loves the works of Norman Rockwell for scent-amental reasons.

Pepe has a puppy, and the puppy's stomach is pink. Pepe kisses the puppy's stomach. Kiss, kiss, kiss.

Pepe's puppy is a cutie and a sweetie.

Penelope Pussycat| 10.29.10 @ 8:53AM

And Pepe also is a cutie and a sweetie.

Harry R.| 10.29.10 @ 8:54AM

Just curious, Penelope.

Are you Pepe's girlfriend?

Penelope Pussycat| 10.29.10 @ 9:07AM

Yes, Harry, Pepe and I are " in a relationship."

And we would like you to know that we have developed a very close friendship with Sasha and Malia Obama's dog, Bo.

Bo is the cutest thing . . . and he's never naughty.

Remember how George W. Bush's scotties would rip around the White House, carrying on something scandalous?

Well, Bo is a well-behaved pooch, and Pepe and I have taken him to our hearts. And Bo loves to play with Pepe's new puppy.

Pepe Le Pew| 10.29.10 @ 9:10AM

Penelope and I will have more on Bo later. Stay tuned.

Andrew B| 10.29.10 @ 8:30AM

I think that urban sophisticates like Mr. Gopnik need to get out more. I recall visiting friends in a small town in Iowa while travelling cross-c0untry. I arrived earlier than expected, and so sat on the porch to await my friends' return. When the paterfamilias arrived he was shocked to see me outside, and wondered why I hadn't made myself comfortable in the living room.

"I don't have a key" was my answer.

"Andrew, " he replied, "we don't have locks."

Norman Rockwell would have known that without being told. Mr. Gopnik would never understand.

David Anderson| 10.29.10 @ 7:51PM

Andrew B - You have hit on the essence of the issue. You have described the values of people who live in places like Iowa and Mr. Gropnik could never fathom that reality. Meanwhile Mr. Gropnik accepts his own personal hell and can't understand why we would not want to live there.

It is a divide that is uncrossable and will always be thus.

Richard| 10.29.10 @ 10:18AM

At the risk of sounding dismissive of Mr. Bowman's sound critique of Blake Gopnik's review of the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Gopnik's review (which may have lined some bird cages before recycling) is of vastly less importance than Rockwell's fine paintings. Those caged by ideology, like Mr. Gopnik apparently is, fail to see that part of Rockwell's gift was to present - to 'illustrate' if you will - a slice of America he saw, as it was. Poor Mr. Gopnik, so ready to pounce on Norman Rockwell so as to demonstrate hisenlightened leftist credentials. He failed to note image of dignity of women that Rockwell captured in the painting of the girl shooting marbles, on the path to collecting all the best marbles from her little boy competitors. Or the immortal "Freedom of Speech" painting, which has even appeared in some editions of Howard Zinn's history texts, for heaven's sake. What I find noteworthy, and a source for hope in this age where division is celebrated, is that the collectors who donated the Rockwell works to Smithsonian for this show were George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg, pedigreed political liberals, but (at least as one might infer from their Rockwell collections and their remarks about same) lovers of great story-telling, of the story of our country as presented by Rockwell and - dare I say it - lovers of great art. No, Norman Rockwell may not be Diego Velasquez, but many of his paintings (or illustrations, if you must) are immortal because they capture the society of his time. Yes, as viewed through the prism of Mr. Rockwell's judgment and preconceptions - but then this is true of any artist. People will be reflecting on Rockwell's works for decades to come to 'see' what America looked like during his time. That, and not Mr. Gopnik's forgettable review, is the story. And readers of Mr. Bowman's article who are in a position to do so, really should head to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art to see Norman Rockwell's works for themselves to be enlightened and, yes, inspired.

Richard

Sheila| 10.29.10 @ 12:20PM

What you find a source of hope, I find extremely depressing. Stephen Speilberg, who particularly despises that "mythical" America (so racist, so sexist, so antisemitic!) that Rockwell chronicled, is now in position to deny use of that art to those patrons who would particularly enjoy it for the somewhat sentimentalized reality it portrays. His ownership of so much of Rockwell's paintings is akin to all those historical revisionists busily at work at the Smithsonian, which I no longer visit. The last time I traveled to D.C. and took my son, the main exhibits were about all the Japanese Americans who we put in concentration camps (with the torture and evil the term implies), the transformative nature of blacks' migration north during WWII, and women politicians. Yet another cultural institution destroyed by the left.

David| 10.29.10 @ 10:31AM

I suspect that most of the negative criticism of Rockwell comes not from those who dislike Rockwell's work, but rather from those who dislike those who like Rockwell's work. I've known more than a few New Yorkers whose simple standard when it came to art was: If middle America likes it, then I hate it.

Maddox| 10.29.10 @ 12:08PM

Yes, it is as simple as that.

JimH| 10.29.10 @ 11:41AM

America may not be entirely as portrayed by Rockwell’s paintings, He knew the country’s warts, but he also knew that what a nations wants to see itself as and aspire to is as important as what it is

T.Johnson| 10.30.10 @ 2:44AM

Jim, thank you for your insight. Denise Prager, the radio guy, once met an Iraqi on an airplane and asked him what he thought was distinctive about the Iraqi people. The man said, We are the cruelist people in the world!
I would prefer to see us in the way Mr Rockwell's painting portrayed us.

Anthony| 10.29.10 @ 2:50PM

Mr. Gopnick would most certainly have had a much more nuianced perspective of the Rockwell paintings if they had been presented in containers of urine. The juxtaposition would have sent Gopnick into spasisms of utter joy, as he no doubt felt about Andre Serrano's "pis christ".
Maybe Gopnick would have prefered posters Pepe and Penelope copulating doggy style in front of the exhibition, to provide an edgy, provacative, counter-perspective to Mr. Rockwell's quaint cliches.
Isn't that how you elites talk?

Alan Brooks| 10.29.10 @ 3:29PM

"Just curious, Penelope.
Are you Pepe's girlfriend?"

Or boyfriend?

kiltmaker| 10.29.10 @ 4:37PM

Rockwell took a snapshot of America at its best. That America may be partly myth, but many believe it to be worth striving to revive. Not the actual events, but the goodness, basic, America that was exceptional.
Another example is Frank Capra using "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to capture a fact/fantasy of America we would all love to live in. These are memories of things that may or may not have happened, but we all wish we had been there when they occurred.
I feel like I lived in an area like this. We didn't lock doors, (sometimes I still don't) the kids ran all over the neighborhood, life felt like the summers would go on forever, but the winters were full of Rockwell portraits of snowball fights, putting up the Christmas tree, visiting Grandma's for Thanksgiving dinner.
It was a "Wonderful Life" (even if I mis-remember it)

SC Mike| 10.29.10 @ 5:32PM

I drove up to NoVA to take my 86-year-old mom to the Rockwell exhibit and the look on her face as we wandered through the wonderfully-arranged gallery was worth every one of the 1,000 miles I covered, the $20 for a couple hours parking, the tolls, and the traffic.

See the durn thing before it leaves January 2, 2011.
http://americanart.si.edu/exhi...../rockwell/

Many thanks to Messrs. Lucas and Spielberg for making their collections accessible in such a fashion, and thanks to Booz Allen Hamilton for sponsoring the DC exhibit.

Richard| 10.29.10 @ 5:50PM

One of the things I find so depressing about trying to comment on this site is the fact that so many people here are shoulder deep in their own bile. Sheila, Stephen Spielberg is a collector, which means that he spends his own money to purchase art that he likes or admires. In the school of conservatism in which I was raised, that is an exercise of ones property rights. He and Lucas have chosen -whether for self-interested motives or altruistic motives - to loan works of Norman Rockwell's that they own to the Smithsonian for exhibit. I'm going to assume altruistic, since I spent some time reading what each man said in his notes that are provided at the exhibit. Rockwell's paintings speak for themselves, and therefore speak to those who see them at the Smithsonian. And, for what it is worth, Mr. Spielberg directed one of the most vivid cinematic depictions of Americans at war in "Saving Private Ryan", a film we first went to see on the recommendation of several retired Navy officers with whom we discussed the film at the wake of my father-in-law, a D-Day veteran. Spielberg has described the film as an effort to pay back the inestimable debt he recognizes that he owes to his father and to others who served in World War II. Yes, he's a person who takes liberal positions and contributes heavily to candidates of the American Left, but I find his efforts in "Saving Private Rya" and his thoughts about it to be patriotic reflections. This doesn't mean I agree with him, but it does mean I can admire what I find admirable in him. And I think both his Rockwell collection and his choice to share it with the public to be similarly admirable.

And on the subject of the Japanese internees: they were in a great many cases American citizens whose property and whose freedom were denied them because of xenophobic overreaction, something that is all too common in war. Their story, and the story of their sons who nevertheless served their nation in uniform, often heroically, is an American story. As is the story of black Americans who migrated north to seek a better way of life, and who ultimately felt empowered to pursue justice. Many have remarked on a liberal bias that takes shape from time to time in the Smithsonian collection. But there is plenty to see in that collection, and around our Nation's Capital, where I live, that speaks to the greatness of this nation , and the fact that it is the product in large part of vigorous and lively debate throughout its history. That is, unless one wishes to cower in the echo chamber of one's own ideology and resentments. Which is not where one would be likely to find Norman Rockwell, or those he portrayed.

Richard

Bob| 10.29.10 @ 8:26PM

My grandfather, a rather unsentimental Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, taught Sunday School in his lower-East Side Manhattan neighborhood in the late 19th- and early-20th century. One of his students in that tough place was Norman Rockwell. Rockwell's father asked my grandfather, who was on his own way to being a successful businessman, to talk some sense into his son who wanted to be an artist, instead of getting a practical job. My grandfather did go to have a talk with the boy, but on seeing his pictures told the old man, "You know, he is really pretty talented. Maybe he should be an artist."

Many years later, my aunt introduced herself to Rockwell. "If it weren't for your father, I could never have become who I am," he said.

I tell this not to aggrandize my family, but because when I hear smart urban intellectuals mock the small-town virtues of Rockwell's scenes (sorry, they would have put "virtues" in quotes) I recall that those virtues actually first were drawn on the crowded streets of the lower East Side, and that Rockwell was not presenting a world that no longer was, but one that is yet to be.

Tom Baker | 10.29.10 @ 9:08PM

Speaking as an artist who has studied Rockwell's writings and techniques extensively, I can tell you that he didn't consider his art to be exceptional, and he didn't use archival materials in the making of them. His comment when told that his paintings wouldn't last was "Let the next generation create its own paintings."

After a painting was used on the cover of the Post he considered it irrelevant and often didn't preserve it. Once a visitor to his studio noticed an old painting tossed aside and asked if she might have it, since he didn't appear to want it. He gave it to her, and it's now worth a considerable amount of money.

It did bother Rockwell that he was not considered a "true" artist, but "only" an illustrator. For years no fine-art gallery would exhibit his work. But of course, realist paintings by any artist have been ridiculed since the turn of the 20th century, and those who collected such "worthless" art as Adolphe Bouguereau's when it wasn't worth much are now finding that they own very valuable paintings indeed, as the art world begins to see that much of "modern art" is a hoax.

My rule of thumb is: if you need an art critic to tell you why a piece of art is "important," then it is not important, and in fact is usually junk.

Norman Rockwell's early paintings, before he began painting almost exclusively fore the Post, rival anything produced by any artist anywhere, at any time. I (and may others who know art from the production side) think he was the greatest painter that America has ever produced.

Tom Baker (thomasbakerpaintings.com)

Tex Expatriate| 10.30.10 @ 1:17PM

Well, now. I'm 73 years old and I can attest that Mr. Rockwell's America surely did exist. I passed my shildhood and grew to manhood in it.

Tom Baker makes an excellent point about Rockwell. His works other than his illustrations were very fine.

ZZZ| 10.30.10 @ 3:00PM

You look at his paintings and know that Norman Rockwell liked people. About which of today's left-wing artists could the same be said?

Tex Expatriate| 10.30.10 @ 7:12PM

Not only that, ZZZ, but Rockwell KNEW people and knew Americans---the genuine Americans, not the ones who make up the core of the Democrat Party today.

Jack Smiles| 10.30.10 @ 7:41PM

I'm a writer and reading this makes me want to quit. It's just too damn good.
Well, done James Bowman.

megapotamus| 10.31.10 @ 11:58AM

As with the antiwarriors, these antijudgementalists are full-square for judgements so long as it is their own, not that prevail but are considered publicly at all.

Simon Templar| 11.1.10 @ 12:50AM

Rockwell was an illustrator. His work followed much of what most illustration has done in its form and tradition. The idyllic is often the aim of most of this art. Rockwell was not an idiot and realized he was painting America as what we might hope it could be...and in some sense what it is...its the values that these illustrations portray that the liberal intellectual objects to with such vehemence not the style or all this other crap about realism or myth.

Saustin| 11.1.10 @ 3:36AM

I didn't see a link to Mr. Gopnik's review so I
can't really comment on the tone of it, but I can comment on the tone of this article and the comments that follow. I'm a 35 year old liberal who loves Rockwell and It's a Wonderful Life. I didn't realize liberals weren't suppose to like these things. What makes you think we don't?

Wayne | 1.8.11 @ 11:45PM

I'll have to watch and see if James has any comments on the True Grit Movie. The Coen Bros made the movie without profanity, and it was gritty and clean. Amazing really. The bad guys didn't even cuss. They were Rockwell bad guys. Great Movie!

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Christian Louboutin | 6.23.11 @ 6:05AM

In an episode of The Simpsons titled "Home Away from Homer," Homer Simpson's goodie-goodie neighbor Ned Flanders decides to move from Springfield to Humbleton,

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