The best exhibition held in London in 2011 was at the Dulwich
Picture Gallery and featured the works of Norman Rockwell. The show
was also at the National Museum of American Illustration in
Newport, Rhode Island, but for those who missed it, the splendid
catalogue,
Norman Rockwell’s America …In England, by Judy
Goffman Cutler and Laurence S. Cutler, is an excellent substitute
and will make a welcome Christmas present.
Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) is one of those rare artists
who have an immediate, intimate, and special relationship with the
public. He does not need any explaining, justifying, or theorizing.
What he does is obvious and the virtues it displays are
overwhelmingly apparent. He showed how ordinary Americans lived,
worked, laughed, and worried, had fun and argued, learned and
enjoyed themselves, in peace and war, in the second quarter of the
20th century, in authentic detail and with dazzling accuracy in
hundreds of covers for the Saturday
Evening Post. His was perhaps the most
sustained and successful exercise in social realism in the whole
history of art, remarkable alike for superb craftsmanship,
unflinching honesty, and invariable consistency.
Of course the art critics hated him, and still do. He left
them with no function to perform. He spoke directly to the public,
and readers responded with enthusiasm. He is as popular now as
ever, and the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where
he lived and worked, and where many of his original works are on
display, is always crowded with visitor manifestly enjoying
themselves. The place is worth a visit not least because the locals
are instantly recognizable as the descendants of the people in his
covers. The little town is still Rockwell’s world.
Art critics try to dismiss Rockwell as a “mere
illustrator.” But you could say the same about the Limbourg
brothers who created that masterpiece of the 15th century, the
Très Riches Heures du Duc de
Berry, or the great Dutch genre painters of the 17th
century like Pieter de Hooch, Vermeer, or Gerard Dou, or those
splendid Victorians like Maddox Brown or W.P. Frith. Rockwell dealt
in truth and reality. His figures actually existed and he made them
live in a way no photograph can ever quite do. In centuries to come
people will turn to him to know exactly what the Americans of his
time looked like and how they behaved. No doubt his prices will
rise accordingly, and indeed in 50 years’ time his pictures will no
longer be on the market: they will all be in public
collections.
There is another reason why Rockwell appeals. He portrayed
an America which was democratic, freedom-loving, egalitarian,
enterprising, and dynamic, which was sure of itself and its aims,
and believed in its destiny. This was not the doubting, nervous,
fearful, neurotic America we sometimes see today, with its racially
hyphenated complexes and its pessimism about the future. Rockwell’s
America was the creation of the melting pot, enjoying the legacy of
Lincoln, the ebullience of Theodore Roosevelt, the vision of
Woodrow Wilson, and the canny frugality of Coolidge. It was an
enormously productive, fruitful, varied, and creative society and
Rockwell painted its portrait and prosopography. All this gives him
some claim to be considered the finest American artist of the 20th
century, and this exciting little volume, price $35, is the perfect
introduction to his work.
