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Norman Rockwell exhibit opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
The sales pitch
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Painting from scenes he set up, propped and cast -- or more often from snapshots of those scenes -- Rockwell achieved a photographic vision meant to convince us of the simple truth of what his images show. Even after all these years, high realist pictures never fail to play the magic trick of making us think that because they look so real, they must show things as they are.
Rockwell's technique goes further. Because of his pictures' particular perspectival constructions, some of them can give a sense that his subjects are being viewed from some slight distance off, by someone removed from the hurly-burly they show. (In one image, which depicts a teacher receiving birthday wishes from her class, the scene's imagined viewer would have to be floating in mid-air to see things as the painting shows them.) It's as though Rockwell's subjects have been recorded by a remote, objective watcher whose vision we can trust.
Rockwell's art makes Rockwell's America seem natural and necessary. His easy, untroubled realism is the perfect vehicle for an image of the nation as easygoing and untroubled: Looking at (or through) a Rockwell surface is as painless as living in a Rockwell world.
Not that Rockwell ever quite heads for a full-blown photorealism, in Richard Estes mode. He takes care to keep a few hints of the passage of his brush, which let him borrow some of the prestige of the Old Masters. He joins the persuasive power of photographic technology to the "hard work" of realist painting, with its popular appeal.
Sometimes Rockwell so badly wants his photo-based pictures to look painted, even once they've been reduced and reproduced in print, that he starts by laying down a rough surface of generically expressive brushstrokes, then applies his tightly rendered image on top. Those brushstrokes tell us that his Rockwellian America is better than simply real -- it belongs to the hallowed realm of art. (In case Rockwell himself failed to get that message across, the current owners of his paintings have framed his down-to-earth, supposedly democratic canvases in enough curlicues and gilt to please Louis XIV.)
Of course, the "art" in Rockwell's pictures isn't that modern stuff promoted by Picasso and his crowd. Rockwell's painted realism tells us that his pictures are the real thing, old-fashioned and skilled -- the very art admired by the kinds of regular, all-American folk his craft is used to depict, and to whom it sells magazines and products.
By the 1930s, making pictures the way Rockwell did couldn't count as just a neutral preference for the old. In the hands of America's Favorite Artist, it stood as a willed repudiation of the new. Judging from the fan mail that survives, that's precisely how it was read. Rockwell panders, in the very substance of his pictures' making, to his public's fear of change.
The art of the received idea
Rockwell's greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché. The reason we so easily "recognize ourselves" in his paintings 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. To sell the publications and goods his pictures were in aid of, Rockwell's images needed to be grasped and digested in seconds -- and, unlike really notable art, they reliably achieved such fast-food effects.
His young women are always "spunky" or "hotties." Young girls are "impish" or "pure." Husbands are "harried" and Grandpa is "kindly." And young boys -- as the art history scholar Eric Segal has pointed out -- are either good and scrappy, busy roughhousing at the rural swimming hole, or urban and effeminate and overcivilized, in need of a good, toughening hazing.
Segal is part of a Rockwell reassessment that began around the time of the artist's last Washington retrospective, held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art just 10 years ago. If the experts haven't found new reasons to like him, they've found new ways to look at his achievement. 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." The eminent art historian Alan Wallach has dared to see Rockwell's "capitalist realism" as deeply ideological, along the lines of socialist realism.
Most reactions to Rockwell, however, continue to be decidedly simpler. Steven Spielberg has said, "I look back at these paintings as America the way it could have been, the way someday it may again be." He and others have bought Rockwell's bill of goods. But what these speakers, and these pictures, fail to grasp is that the special, courageous greatness of the nation lies in its definitive refusal of any single "American way."
America isn't about Rockwell's one-note image of it -- or anyone else's. This country is about a game-changing guarantee that equal room will be made for Latino socialists, disgruntled lesbian spinsters, foul-mouthed Jewish comics and even, dare I say it, for metrosexual half-Canadian art critics with a fondness for offal, spinets and kilts.
I don't want to live by the clichés of a wan, Rockwellian America, and I don't admire pictures that suggest that all of us should. But I see why we need to look into how, in a world full of threats, so many of us have been soothed by their vision.
Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg is on through Jan. 2 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at Eighth and G streets NW. Call 202-633-7970 or visit http:/