Norman Conquest

Who but Norman Rockwell could paint such a picture? What other artist could have spoofed, so gently and so effectively, his own ambitions? What other artist of recent memory has been blessed with such a combination of light-heartedness, self-assurance, and talent? Talent indeed, because very few painters could have conceived of, let alone executed, this marvel of design and draftsmanship.

The public always loved Rockwell, while the critics consigned him to the kitsch pile. But the collapse of the modernist consensus in support of abstract expressionism has opened the way for a re-appraisal. Of kitsch, that is. Rockwell heads the list of cherished exemplars of “bad art.” He has become a camp figure, a source of postmodern diversion, an amusing medium for enlightened sociological diagnosis of Middle America’s delusions and dreams.

What remains in short supply is appreciation of Rockwell’s artistry. Needless to say, his subject matter, which revolved largely around the cheerful portrayal of small-town life, had much to do with his success. But an ordinary painter wouldn’t have gotten very far relying on the sentimental scenes and silly gags that were Rockwell’s stock in trade. What makes his best pictures work is his redoubtable art.

Of course, there’s not much point in comparing Rockwell to Cezanne or Picasso. He relied on long-standing conventions of pictorial communication that the Frenchman and the Spaniard made it their business to ignore. But if we want to judge him, as we should, by the standards those conventions impose, we have a welcome opportunity with the new exhibition of his work, on view at the Corcoran Museum in Washington until September 24. (The exhibition has already been seen in Atlanta and Chicago; from Washington it will travel to San Diego, Phoenix, Stockbridge, and New York.)

Born in 1894, Norman Rockwell spent the first nine or ten years of his life in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in New York City. His early years left him with a bad impression of the city, an impression that was reinforced by idyllic sojourns on farms where his family boarded on summer vacations. He entered art school as a teenager. Even though he regarded the golden age of book and magazine illustration as a thing of the past — book publishers were making less use of pictures, while magazine editors were making more use of photographs — he quickly concluded that it was in illustration his talent lay.

He was also intensely ambitious. At nineteen, he was named art editor of Boys’ Life, the Boy Scout magazine; a few years later he produced the first of the 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post he would paint over nearly half a century. Like the vast majority of artists across the ages, he produced work he thought his clientele — the Post’s readership — would like. The competition in magazine illustration was brutal: Rockwell saw his admired and successful colleague J. C. Leyendecker dumped by the Post and the advertising agencies, and reduced to obscurity and low-grade work in his final years. Rockwell never took his popularity or his paycheck for granted.

Nor, conventional painter that he was, did he ever dispense with the fully three-dimensional modeling of his figures, or a reliance on movement, gesture, and vivid characterization. It would be very hard, in fact, to find a contemporary artist capable of portraying the human body in motion with anything like the fluidity with which Rockwell rendered the three rascals clutching their clothes and dashing past a No Swimming sign in his famous Post cover picture of 1921. Color schemes were skillfully woven into his designs, and he employed the traditional technique of underpainting his figures with a layer of monochrome paint (often Mars violet) in order to endow his pictures with a unity of tone.

And yet Rockwell’s work changed considerably over time. The camera, ironically enough, was the most conspicuous factor in his development. In his earlier Post covers — those done during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s — his figures are more stylized, his designs simpler, flatter, and more schematic, with backgrounds merely suggested rather than fleshed out in detail. No Swimming shows only the three boys, a dog, and the No Swimming sign; besides a hint of grass, there is nothing else in the picture. Similarly, a 1929 cover picture shows only a decidedly down-at-heel cop at a speed-trap, peering out from behind a “Welcome to Elmville” sign, whistle between his lips, stop watch, and billy club in hand. The cop and the sign are the picture. A more spatially articulated Post cover from 1937 shows a workman painting a road’s centerline that both creates the setting for the picture (in which the man is startled by a dog chasing a cat across the freshly drawn line) and defines a tilted picture plane (which conveys a sense of spatial depth). Still, Rockwell saw no need here for an abundance of incidental detail.

With these earlier covers, reliance on photography is either non-existent or not evident. It was during the 1940s that photography became pronounced in Rockwell’s work — sometimes too pronounced.

Rockwell had always needed to work from models in bringing his ideas to the canvas. Photography made it easier for him not only to compose pictures involving difficult perspectives, which appealed to editors, but it also freed Rockwell from the need to employ models striking uncomfortable poses for hours on end. (He says in his autobiography that it took him three or four days to paint a human figure from a model.) Before his conversion to the camera, he had to rely on a limited number of paid models, who recur like stock characters in his earlier work. Now he could just take a picture of someone, or something, he wanted to paint.

Photography, along with improved printing technology, also allowed Rockwell to dispense with the white backgrounds of the sort we encounter in the No Swimming cover. He took to filling, even cramming, the picture frame with detail.

One of Rockwell’s immensely popular pictures illustrating Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” shows a matron bearing a turkey to the table at a joyous Thanksgiving gathering. Painted in 1943, the picture is based on a Thanksgiving photograph — and if it weren’t for Rockwell’s color, the painting might as well be a photograph. Coleridge recognized long ago that mere duplication is not art, because it is devoid of emotional resonance. And Freedom From Want is strikingly inartistic.

To be sure, the photographically oriented method also accounts for some of Rockwell’s most remarkable, and best loved, pictures — pictures with a narrative depth Rockwell had never previously achieved. Telling a story, after all, is what illustration is all about. Saying Grace, the 1951 Saturday Evening Post cover, shows an elderly woman and a little boy saying a prayer at a table in a diner. A couple of young men at the same table, one with a union button pinned on his cap, behold the curious spectacle. An older, world-wearier man entering the diner looks on reverentially. The praying figures are set against a broad expanse of window glass, which permits a view of a railway yard and a factory that Rockwell renders in monochrome.

The patterned fabric of the elderly woman’s handbag and the alligator skin of an overnight bag not only call attention to themselves through their elaborate depiction — a familiar practice in Renaissance painting — but also tell us that the woman and her grandson are strangers to the city. The industrial scene in the background, the other figures in the picture, and even the cigarette butts scattered on the floor serve as foils to their small-town piety.

In another painting from the same period, we peer in through the window of a darkened barbershop to a brightly lit back room where we see a clarinetist, a violinist, and a cellist playing. The window has a crack, and its frame could use a paint job. In the front room we see the barbershop chair, the magazine racks, a wood stove with coals aglow, cluttered shelves, and a “Remember December 7” poster with a tattered American flag flying at half-mast hanging on the wall. A cat in the front room watches the musicians with us. The foreshortened stove pipe running into the back room and the strong contrast in light between the two rooms accentuate the sense of three-dimensional space.

As with Saying Grace, the profusion of precisely rendered detail betrays Rockwell’s reliance on photography, but in neither case can photography account for the animated pictorial space he succeeds in creating. Painted in 1950, Shuffleton’s Barbershop conveys an idea, or an ideal, of the juxtaposition of the ramshackle commonplace with loftier elements in the fabric of American life. It adheres too closely to natural appearances to be a great work, but in conception it is admirable.

By the early 1950s, television had cut into the Saturday Evening Post’s circulation and advertising revenue. Thanks to photography, moreover, the Post had less need of Rockwell’s services, and was less interested in the sort of pictures that had made him famous. He left the magazine in 1963 for Look. Though Rockwell felt the need to be more topical during the final phase of his career, his best picture from this period differs from his earlier work only in terms of subject. Painted in 1964, The Problem We All Live With shows a black child in a white dress being escorted to school by U.S. marshals (who are shown only from the shoulder down). The figures are set in relief against a white wall scarred by tokens of racism. The simplicity of this effective narrative concept is pure Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell died in 1978, at the age of eighty-four, at his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Presumably the fact that the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge is one of the two institutions that organized the current Rockwell exhibition has something to do with the informative and unpatronizing character of the commentary accompanying the pictures.

Rockwell’s critical reputation still suffers from the breach between illustration and fine art that grew wider as he grew older. The breach, of course, was already evident when he was a student. Impressionism had abolished narrative content and the depiction of movement and gesture as constituent elements of painting, while doing away with traditional notions of color as a factor in design.

Because they focused on the optical effects of natural light, moreover, the Impressionists had also legitimized flatter, more two-dimensional modeling, along with the flattening of pictorial space. As modernist tendencies developed and abstraction gained ground during Rockwell’s career, cultivated opinion and the general public entertained increasingly divergent notions of what art is.

Rockwell’s achievement — which undeniably falls short of the highest reach of artistic greatness — consists largely in employing traditional conventions so effectively that he was able to make sentimental subjects artistically viable. By the same token, the heightening and refining of the emotions associated with the great tradition in painting and sculpture revolves around a more exalted, more purely imaginative view of the world than Rockwell could ever offer. His academic naturalism is at odds with what the critic Pierce Rice calls the “idealized and generalized” representation of nature, which has shaped Western art of the greatest emotional power from the age of Phidias down to Honore Daumier and Winslow Homer.

Daumier, the nineteenth-century French master who made his name as an illustrator, could not paint what was before him; Rockwell could paint only what was before him. Yet Rockwell’s polished naturalism is perfectly compatible with his commonplace themes. In the case of Freedom of Speech (the best of the “Four Freedoms” series), it served his purposes wonderfully: The working man speaking up at a town meeting is one of America’s democratic icons, and few pictures have made a deeper impact on the nation.

Rockwell and his colleagues J. C. Leyendecker, Maxfield Parrish, and N. C. Wyeth enriched the mainstream culture by bringing illustration and decoration of a high order to bear on books, magazines, posters, and calendars that were part of everyday life. The main reason we have no painters of Rockwell’s caliber these days is that we have very little in the way of cultural infrastructure, at the educational and critical level, supporting the development of traditional artists. The dominance of photography and computer-generated design seems too secure for artistic illustration to pose any threat in the foreseeable future. But talented artists schooled in the great tradition would surely encounter plenty of market demand for their work.

People — even people with considerable disposable income — are instinctively drawn to scenographic illusionism in art. It is one of those intractable facts of human nature, part of the way people go about making themselves at home in the world. That instinct has usually been fulfilled not by artists who represent the world either in abstract terms or just as it is, but, as Norman Rockwell put it, by artists who have the talent, training, and confidence to show the world as they “would like it to be.”

Catesby Leigh is an art critic living in Washington, D.C.