Art admirers find Norman Rockwell to their liking

Norman Rockwell's work is no longer a cliché ["Afraid to make waves," Arts & Style, July 4]. He has been replaced by a new cliché: dogmatic, postmodernist art critics who believe that anything may qualify as legitimate art (including a belch or scribble) as long as it is not a painting by Norman Rockwell. When Blake Gopnik dismissed technical skill and traditional technique in his quest for "new acts," he failed to realize just how much of a tired stereotype he has become.

The taint of Rockwell's commercial sponsors has dissipated over the years, so the artist can now be viewed more objectively by those with an open mind to do so. If Gopnik had some of the "courage" that he claims Rockwell lacked, he would see beyond his personal grudges with Rockwell's content and recognize a contemporary art scene that is self-indulgent, decadent and listing toward irrelevance. Time for "new acts," indeed.

David Apatoff, McLean

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When a boy, I waited each week for the mailman to bring the Saturday Evening Post. Many issues featured Norman Rockwell covers, which I studied for their self-contained stories.

When I got to The Post's July 4 retrospective, I recognized the illustration as Rockwell's even before finding his name. He was that kind of artist. Like the boy in the illustration, I remembered my fear atop the diving tower of Olympic Pool in my Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood. My memory took me back to the irregular appearance in the magazine of the adventures of Alexander Botts, the traveling salesman of Earthworm tractors whose letters to the home office each ended with a cliff-hanging situation.

Those days of the late '30s and early '40s were times that Blake Gopnik obviously does not understand. His America is about "equal room for Latino socialists, disgruntled lesbian spinsters, foul-mouthed Jewish comics" and, we are to understand, critics like him. Gopnik also averred that Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting -- which he might rightly have labeled propaganda -- "doesn't invoke a communist printing his pamphlets or an atheist on a soapbox." Those images might fit with the definition of free speech, all right, but the painting gets closer to the real constitutional guarantee of the right to criticize government with impunity.

Rockwell might not rank in the top tier of artists, but his craft pleased so many Americans that he is worthy of a retrospective. He might have whetted the artistic appetites of hundreds of thousands more of his fellow, cliché-loving Americans. The fact of the current show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum indicates that Rockwell may have some staying power.

Carl Eifert, Alexandria