American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (2 page)

I did not grow up with a Norman Rockwell poster hanging in my bedroom. I grew up gazing at a Helen Frankenthaler poster, with bright, runny rivulets of orange and yellow bordering a rectangle whose center remained daringly blank. As an art-history major, and later as an art critic, I was among a generation that was taught to think of modern art as a kind of luminous, cleanly swept room. Abstract painting, our professors said, jettisoned the accumulated clutter of five hundred years of subject matter—from languid Madonnas and racked saints to tabletops laden with curvy fruit—in an attempt to reduce art to pure form.

Rockwell? Oh, God. He was viewed as a cornball and a square, a convenient symbol of the bourgeois values modernism sought to topple. His long career overlapped with the key art movements of the twentieth century, from Cubism to Minimalism, but while most avant-gardists were heading down a one-way street toward formal reduction, Rockwell was driving in the opposite direction—he was putting stuff
into
art. His paintings have human figures and storytelling, snoozing mutts, grandmothers, clear-skinned Boy Scouts, and wood-paneled station wagons. They have policemen, attics, and floral wallpaper. Moreover, most of them began life as covers for
The Saturday Evening Post
, a weekly general-interest magazine that paid Rockwell for his work, and paychecks, frankly, were another modernist no-no. Real artists were supposed to live hand to mouth, preferably in walk-up apartments in Greenwich Village.

The scathing condescension directed at Rockwell during his lifetime eventually made him a prime candidate for revisionist therapy, which is to say, an art-world hug. He received one posthumously, in the fall of 2001, when Robert Rosenblum, the brilliant Picasso scholar and art-world contrarian in chief, presided over a Rockwell exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It represented a historic collision between mass taste and museum taste, filling the pristine spiral of the Goog with Rockwell’s plebeian characters, the barefoot country boys and skinny geezers with sunken cheeks and Rosie the Riveter sitting triumphantly on a crate, savoring her white-bread sandwich.

I first wrote about Rockwell in 1999, in an article for
The New York Times Magazine.
1
The day after it was published, Jarvis Rockwell, an artist himself, called me up out of the blue and mentioned that a serious biography of his father remained to be written. I had written biographies of Jackson Pollock and Joseph Cornell, members of the American avant-garde whose work embodied the romance of New York bohemia at midcentury. I decided to write this book because I was curious about the part of American culture that did not unfurl in Greenwich Village or represent the counterculture, about the part that lies beyond (some would say beneath) the official story of art.

To be sure, the basic outlines of his life have been visible at least since 1960, when, with the help of his writer-son Thomas Rockwell, he published his autobiography,
My Adventures as an Illustrator.
Through no fault of Tom’s, who assembled the book from a series of anecdotes his father recorded on a Dictaphone, the omissions are fairly enormous. Although Rockwell offers lengthy descriptions of his Navy buddies and his acquaintances at a New York boardinghouse, such as the pseudonymous middle-aged women who came to meals in their bathrobes and hairnets and never failed to raise hell about specks of dirt on the silverware, he barely mentions his marriages, his politics, his psychiatrists, or his constant treks to Southern California. He forgets to mention when people close to him, including his wives, die. And, perhaps out of modesty, he doesn’t see fit to discuss the meaning of his work.

The great subject of his work was American life—not the frontier version, with its questing for freedom and romance, but a homelier version steeped in the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of America’s founding in the eighteenth century. The people in his paintings are related less by blood than by their participation in civic rituals, from voting on Election Day to sipping a soda at a drugstore counter. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students appreciate their teachers and remember their birthdays. Citizens at town hall meetings stand up and speak their mind without getting booed or shouted down by gun-toting rageaholics. This is America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity.

Which is not to suggest that Rockwell was a man with an overtly political agenda, a Thomas Jefferson with a paintbrush, contriving to improve the character of our national life. His political sensibility was elusive and lay dormant for decades. He first registered to vote in 1926, with the Republican Party. It was the era of Calvin Coolidge, who is linked to only one famous comment (“The business of America is business”). In those days the Republican Party stood for moderation. This heightens the poignancy of Rockwell’s transformation, decades later, into a man who championed nuclear disarmament, voted for Lyndon Johnson for president, and produced the single most memorable painting to emerge from the civil rights movement.

Who was Norman Rockwell? A lean, bluish man with a Dunhill pipe, his features arranged into a gentle mask of neighborliness. He went on television talk shows and came across as sane and personable, a cracker-barrel philosopher in a tweedy jacket and bow tie, chuckling heartily, the famous pipe jutting.

But behind the mask lay anxiety and fear of his anxiety. On most days, he felt lonesome and loveless. His relationships with his parents, wives, and three sons were uneasy, sometimes to the point of estrangement. He eschewed organized activity. He declined to go to church. For decades he had a lucrative gig providing an annual painting for the Boy Scouts calendar, but he didn’t serve as a troop leader or have his own children join the Scouts.

He was more than a bit obsessive. A finicky eater whose preferred dessert was vanilla ice cream, he once made headlines by decrying the culinary fashion for parsley.
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He wore his shoes too small. Phobic about dirt and germs, he cleaned his studio several times a day. He washed his brushes and even the surfaces of his paintings with Ivory soap. As he grew older, it occurred to him that he was spending a greater proportion of his time cleaning up and a diminishing proportion of time at his easel. He joked that one day he would only clean up.

At age fifty-nine, he entered therapy with Erik Erikson, a celebrated psychoanalyst and German intellectual who came to this country as a refugee from the Nazis. Erikson, who coined the phrase “identity crisis” and had been an artist in his wandering youth, met Rockwell after he joined the staff of the Austen Riggs Center, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Finally, Rockwell found someone in whom he could confide his feelings of inadequacy and despondency, who could normalize them and allow him to become more direct and emotional in his art.

Underlying Rockwell’s every painting and gesture was his faith in the redemptive power of storytelling—stories, he believed, were a buffer against despair and emptiness. Each of his
Post
covers amounts to a one-frame story complete with a protagonist and plot. Among his earliest inspirations was Charles Dickens, who taught him how to espy stories on every street corner. In some ways, Rockwell’s paintings, which are grounded in the rendering of particulars, demand to be “read” like a story. The experience they offer is literary as much as it is visual, in the sense that he cared less about the sensual dazzle of oil paint than the construction of a seamless narrative. The public that saw and appreciated his paintings walked away from them thinking not about about the dominance of cerulean blue or cadmium yellow but about the kid on the twenty-foot-high diving board up in the sky, terrified as he peers over the edge and realizes there is only one way down.

Which is not to diminish Rockwell as an oil-on-canvas painter. He was a master technician. In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, when artists dripped and spattered pigment and took pleasure in the dramatic, death-defying sweep of an extra-large brush, Rockwell favored tiny paintbrushes and punctilious craftsmanship. He would knock himself out trying to conjure the texture of a brick wall or a wicker basket, transporting the objects of this world into the world of painting with an attention to detail that can be viewed as masterful—or neurotic.

He had the misfortune to come of age at a time when realist painting was written off as less “authentic” than abstract painting. Critics denounced him as insufficiently angst ridden and overly cheery. What somehow got lost in the critical discussion is this: looking is an act of passion if you look hard enough.

It probably didn’t help that Rockwell was all too willing to make light of his work. The performer in him relished invitations to speak, be it in front of twelve parents at a monthly PTA meeting, a class of students at the Otis Art Institute in California, or a convocation of the National Press Club in Washington. His voice, a deep baritone, was as resonant as a radio announcer’s. His modesty was legendary. He had the largeness of spirit to pretend that he had no largeness at all. “It was hard to stay in awe of him because he was so little in awe of himself,” recalled Kai T. Erikson, a sociologist and the son of Rockwell’s therapist.
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