theartsdesk in Fort Lauderdale: Norman Rockwell, the American Friend

Resplendent in a great blue coat, a red scarf and beige breeches and waistcoat, as fat-bellied if not as jowly as the Weller Sr drawn by Phiz, Rockwell’s Tony is seasonably jolly - yet his glowing red cheeks and nose indicate that he is also seasonably tipsy, and that his passengers can expect a wayward ride home. Without the suggestion of bibulousness, the picture would have been as unctuous as that of the smiling coal miner in Mine America’s Coal (1944), which Rockwell painted for a patriotic propaganda poster, but Tony’s boozy pallor makes it wonderfully sly.

Merrie Christmas is part of American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell, currently on display at the Museum of Art in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Florida’s largest exhibition space is, in some ways, the last place you’d expect to find a trove of Rockwell paintings, least of all Sam Weller’s dad. Designed by the late Edward Larrabee Barnes, and completed in 1986, the two-floor building, which curves like a giant white comma from its foyer, is a cool paean to modernism, not austere yet the opposite of folksy. Its entrance, moreover, is heralded by palm trees - and Rockwell, a New Yorker who became a Yankee when he moved to Vermont before settling in Massachusetts, surely needs pines.

A bigger issue, of course, is that Rockwell’s work was mostly though not exclusively intended for magazine illustration, not for hanging in airy, streamlined galleries. That American Chronicles, one of two current travelling Rockwell shows along with Norman Rockwell: American Imagist, graces the Fort Lauderdale museum is a testament not just to the beauty of its layout but to the comparatively recent critical reevaluation of a painter whose enormous popularity with the American public mid-century, primarily through his Post covers, wasn’t - and isn’t - shared by the critical elite, especially those championing abstraction. His most famous detractor was Clement Greenberg, who started his famous 1939 essay on the distinction between the avant-garde and mass-market kitsch art by comparing Rockwell with Braque.

Rockwell’s resurgence began with another touring show, Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, which was launched in November 1999. Two months after 9/11, the exhibition arrived at the Guggenheim in Manhattan, an even more unlikely venue than Fort Lauderdale. But at a time when the nation’s sense of itself was shaken, many among the thousands who drank in Rockwell’s nostalgic celebration of American values must have regarded it as a restorative.

 

Art critics Jerry Saltz of The Village Voice and Christian Viveros-Faune of the New York Press were not among them. They were appalled that critics who contributed to the catalogue for the show compared Rockwell favourably to Vermeer, Daumier, Hals, Rubens, Michelangelo, Hogarth, Homer, Toulouse-Lautrec and Warhol. Both cited Rockwell’s dissatisfaction with his sentimental vision at the end of his life. Viveros-Faune wrote: “Rockwell was an artist of meagre imagination and limited talent who gained popular renown by unstintingly providing postwar Americans with exactly the kind of entertainment they wanted - a creative vision just shallow and jug-stupid enough to meet the age’s groundswell of unchecked commercialism on its own terms.”

The chief objections to Rockwell’s art include its denial of complexity and its creation of an illusory America based on pieties, though these, wrote Neil Harris in his tempered essay for the catalogue, “do seem to have their uses. I will readily admit today that there is something to admire in Norman Rockwell’s artistry, even though the static fictions at the heart of his illustrations offer a misleading series of cultural snapshots. He captured only one of many Americas. His pictures also simplified unmercifully and reassured inappropriately. But they did finally project a sense of decencies expected that form part of the foundation of any civil society. The vast Rockwell constituency appreciated loving and respectful human relations. It just didn’t want much complication.” That constituency now includes George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, whose joint collection of over fifty Rockwells will be exhibited at the Smithsonian, in Washington, DC, for six months beginning July 2.

American Chronicles contains 43 canvases and, clustered on one wall at the Fort Lauderdale museum, all 323 of Rockwell’s Post covers, which he painted between 1916 and 1963. The first part of the exhibition focuses on Rockwell’s anecdotal paintings, depicting the quotidian, commonplace experiences of ordinary people and ranging from the whimsical to the serious. I found some of these canvases incredibly moving, among them Girl at Mirror, a 1954 Post cover (pictured above), possibly influenced by Picasso’s painting of the same name and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s The Artist’s Daughter. It shows a girl of about 12, dressed in an old cotton slip and contemplating her face in front of a mirror, which has been propped against a chair, with her clenched hands raised to her chin. Her braids are tightly bound at the back of her head and she is wondering how she would look if her hair were styled like that of Jane Russell, who stares grimly back from a portrait in the magazine on the girl’s lap. On the floor beside the mirror is a discarded doll; at the girl’s foot is a hairbrush, comb, a lipstick and a tin of rouge, both open. The girl is poised between childhood and womanhood and her innocence hovers in the balance. But though she’ll be prey for the cosmetics industry in a year or two, her wistfulness suggests she already has a sense of proportion about her looks. She won’t be a movie star, but she’ll pass muster.

Rockwell was better at painting adolescents than children. After the Prom (a 1957 Post cover), in which a teenage girl invites a soda jerk to sniff her gardenia corsage as her happy escort (probably the soda jerk’s younger brother) looks proudly on and a war veteran watches with approval, is a great social painting; almost as pleasing is Football Hero (a 1938 Post cover), in which a cheerleader attentively sews a letter onto the jersey of a young jock. In contrast, there’s a saccharine quality about The Discovery (1956, pictured below), which shows the shock of a small boy who’s found a Santa suit at the bottom of his father’s chest of drawers, and the four portraits (1954-55) of beaming kids that Rockwell painted for a Kellogg’s ad campaign.

Sometimes children inspire more tenderness when they’re asleep. In Freedom from Fear a painting of a couple tucking in their two young children - the father holding a newspaper that bears a headline containing the words BOMBINGS and HORROR - now seems the most successful of Rockwell’s iconic Four Freedoms, his contribution to the war effort, because it is the least reassuring of the 1943 quartet, which was published in the Post prior to going on tour and being reproduced as posters. Maureen Hart Hennessey has written that “Rockwell’s use of light within the darkened confines of the bedroom…emphasises a sense of warmth and safety”, but the central placement of the newspaper limits the feeling of comfort.

The other paintings in the series, which illustrates the human rights President Roosevelt outlined in his 1941 State of the Union address as a “why we are fighting” imperative, show a working man standing up to speak at a town meeting (Freedom of Speech), grandparents bringing turkey to the Thanksgiving table (Freedom from Want), and a group of people praying (Freedom to Worship). They exude an earnestness that sticks in the craw today even if the four paintings together were, reported The New Yorker in 1945, “received by the public with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than any other paintings in the history of American art”.

As the Fort Lauderdale museum curves to the right, one confronts in the second room of the exhibition the vast expanse of Post covers, only the lowest of which can be scrutinised. These include his portraits of John Kennedy, Nixon, Nehru, and Nasser, technically skilled works of realism that are forgettable alongside the downhome Rockwell. Among the last anecdotal covers was 1960’s Triple Self-Portrait (pictured left; the original painting is also here), Rockwell’s most self-conscious piece. Seen from behind, Rockwell sits at his easel at the moment he is about to start painting a confident Bing Crosby-like portrait he has drawn of himself smoking his pipe, without spectacles. But the face of the painter reflected in the adjacent mirror is that of an uncertain, perhaps anxious man whose eyes cannot be seen behind his glasses. According to the American Chronicles catalogue, Rockwell’s mirror was opposite a large window and his glasses would have reflected the glare of the sun, but the absence of his eyes reinforces the idea that he is not painting what he or we are seeing in reality; the small self-portraits of Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso and Van Gogh that he has tacked to the top right of his canvas are reminders that painters see with more than their eyes. The painting, which refutes the notion that Rockwell’s paintings can be understood at one quick glance, brilliantly deconstructs the artistic process of composition even as it confounds the notion of realism.

Murder in Mississippi, painted for Look magazine, shows the moment at which Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney are being slain. Against the backdrop of a hill of mud, Schwerner holds up the body of his black colleague, Chaney, who is on his knees and probably dead (Rockwell took the pose from a 1962 Pulitzer-winning photo of a priest holding a soldier during a revolt against the Venezuelan government). Goodman’s body lies on the ground in front of them. Only the shadows of the assassins remain from the original study, in which they were lined up with their weapons opposite the three doomed men. Look’s art director chose to use Rockwell’s colour study rather than the finished painting, and Rockwell concurred. “All the anger that was in the sketch had gone out of it,” he later observed. Washed out and devoid of colour except for a murky brown, the sketch is radically different from the rest of the paintings in Rockwell’s highly detailed, perfectionist oeuvre. It is strongly reminiscent of Goya’s The Shootings of May 3rd in Madrid (1814) - and compositionally would have been even more so if Rockwell had kept the Klan members in - and as chilling.

Close by is Rockwell’s other great Civil Rights painting, The Problem We All Live With (1963). His first assignment for Look, it recreates the morning of 14 November, 1960, when six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked for the first time to her desegregated but still all-white school in New Orleans. Dressed in white, carrying books, pencils and a ruler, the girl is being escorted by four deputy US Marshals, two in front, two behind. The “N” word has been scrawled against the wall in the background and a huge tomato has smashed against it, bloodily, having clearly been thrown at the girl a second before. The heads of the marshals are not seen, which places the emphasis on the girl’s experience - Rockwell was a master of ellipsis. Although we know from Ruby Bridges’s accounts that she was scared by some of the threats made against her, the girl in the picture seems unperturbed. She holds her head high and her stride is confident. The picture does not burden her with heroism, however, but shows her quiet purpose. Her very lack of emotion - and the detonated tomato - cause the spectator to ponder the racist hatred of the baying crowd, which would have been standing not so many yards from where we stand when we look at the painting.

“When it comes to the claims being made for Norman Rockwell, my advice is just say no,” Jerry Saltz wrote at the time of the Guggenheim exhibition. “Miss this show and ignore the catalogue,” said Christian Viveros-Faune. These were harsh admonitions against a painter who may not have been a Picasso - to his lasting regret - but who was a formidable wit and a generous observer of people's foibles, and who revealed himself at the end of his career to be a trenchant humanist. It’s a lot to say no to.

American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell runs at the Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, until 7 February. It will be on display at the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas (7 March - 30 May) and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Ralegh (6 November - 30 January 2011). Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg will be at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2 July - 2 January 2011). More information here.