American Mirror the Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
Books of The Times
One Complicated Life, Illustrated
In her engaging and ultimately deplorable biography of Norman Rockwell, Deborah Solomon fills in the partly known life of i of America's most famous and pop illustrator-artists. Because Rockwell has been well documented — from his own autobiography in 1960 to periodic monographs from fine art-book publishers in subsequently decades — a skeptic might enquire if a new accounting is needed. Well, no and yeah.
Arguing against some other publication is the new research in more than recent books. Notable have been the efforts by Karal Ann Marling and Robert Rosenblum, who attempted to modernize Rockwell, as others have Andrew Wyeth, past seeing brainchild in their piece of work that correlates to aspects of Abstract Expressionism. When a retrospective that went to seven museums concluded at the Guggenheim in New York in 2002, the indefatigably imaginative Mr. Rosenblum liked to point out details in Rockwell paintings he could liken to Picasso and Cézanne.
In his catalog essay, Mr. Rosenblum constitute the white wall surface in Rockwell's classic 1964 painting of Ruby Bridges beingness escorted to school evocative of Cy Twombly, and the "Girl at Mirror" a likely reference to Picasso's similar subject field in the Museum of Modernistic Fine art. Ms. Solomon also notes that Rockwell undertook his own version of Pollock in "The Connoisseur," (1962). Her goal, notwithstanding, is less to examine Rockwell'due south creative place in 20th-century painting than to draw his idiosyncratic grapheme and personality disorders.
Other historians accept noted Rockwell's borrowings from Michelangelo, Mondrian and Vermeer for a figural pose or an interior composition. His well-known "Triple Cocky Portrait" (1970), incorporates details from works past Rembrandt, Dürer, Picasso and van Gogh. Rockwell knew his art history from books, museum visits and trips abroad. More than borrowing from the onetime masters, he was sensitive to the artifices of pure pattern and perception. We encounter this in his numerous scenes of figures looking at pictures and of compositions showing paintings inside paintings.
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The 1986 publication of a Rockwell catalogue raisonné and a current reprint of his 332 magazine covers provide a survey of his art. Contributing further attending is the auction this December of three major paintings, including "Maxim Grace" (1951) and "The Gossips" (1948), prompting speculation of bidding at $fifteen million or more than apiece. Thus we may feel his art is well recorded.
But Ms. Solomon'due south book fully justifies a fresh look at his life. An fine art critic and author of biographies of Joseph Cornell and Jackson Pollock and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, she offers something new, entertaining and disturbing. Her claiming was to explain a life utterly unlike from Rockwell's humorous and optimistic paintings. She has told his story with a breadth of facts and narrative finesse. It is a revelation.
Ms. Solomon writes in a informal and conversational way (at one point referring to the Guggenheim Museum as "the Goog"), but this suits Rockwell's lighthearted visual storytelling. Likewise, her account takes shape through compact vignettes of people and events, appropriate to Rockwell'southward cocky-independent aphoristic depictions and often silhouetted figure groupings. She integrates into her story shut readings of selected works. Final sentences to capacity are often pithy and memorable: "When his fellow Americans thought of Rockwell, they thought of the homo they had seen in the newsreel: a friendly and relaxed Vermonter. They thought of someone he did not know."
It is generally known that Rockwell played several sequential roles in choosing his subject field thing: patriot, colonial revivalist, polemicist and political activist. Ms. Solomon spends little time placing Rockwell inside the larger American civilisation. His ordinary themes and narrative content, for instance, may be viewed as a legacy of 19th-century genre painting, exemplified by William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham. And while she notes that his youths have antecedents in Mark Twain's Huck Finn and friends, she doesn't connect his realism to the broader currents of American regionalism and scene painting from the 1920s to the '40s, with which we acquaintance Wyeth, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood.
She does, though, cite Rockwell'southward admitted indebtedness to the illustrator Howard Pyle. A more significant insight is her observation that with the waning of Abstruse Expressionism'south dominance, the emergence of Pop art and Photorealism in the '70s fabricated possible a new surge of critical appreciation for Rockwell's art. Who knew that Andy Warhol bought 2 of his pictures and that Willem de Kooning professed adoration for his designs and textures?
Paradigm
Nearly important, we learn of Rockwell'southward darker side. The life revealed here is one of anxiety, depression and loneliness, with feelings of failure, neglect and inadequacy. Other adjectives depict Rockwell every bit unanchored, repressed and loveless. He was a person of "complicated proclivities" and "extreme dependencies," Ms. Solomon writes. Ane of them was a lifelong reliance on doctors (a frequent image in his art) because of hypochondria, and later regular visits to psychiatrists, about notably the Freud follower Erik Erikson, who became both advisor and friend.
Rockwell married three times, fathering three sons, simply the marriages are characterized as alternatively unhappy, dysfunctional or not sexual. He favored the company of schoolboys as models and younger male artists as friends. 1 later exception was a friendship with the folk painter Grandma Moses, sufficiently older not to be a threatening female presence. Few girls posed for or appeared as convincingly in his compositions.
Was he a repressed homosexual? We don't really know. Ms. Solomon points to the homoerotic undertones in early paintings like "Sailor Dreaming of a Girlfriend" (1919), equally well as two from 1958, "Before the Shot," with its bare behind of an innocent young male child at the doctor'southward office, and "The Delinquent," showing a beefy policeman seated side by side to a boy at a cafeteria counter. She uses the phrase "romantic shell" to describe Rockwell'southward admiration for his young man illustrator, J. C. Leyendecker, creator of the Arrow Collar Human being. Rockwell once admitted, "Sexual practice appeal seems to be something I simply tin't catch on a slice of canvas."
This was an artist most comfortable in his studio with his imagined images and scenes, seldom set in identifiable places. Making employ of photography, he carefully controlled the poses in his compositions. He was compulsive about cleanliness, "a groovy freak," as we're told more than than once, sweeping the studio floor and cleaning his brushes in the sink four or 5 times a day. During his final years, he succumbed to emphysema and dementia.
And and so, after all, Rockwell'due south life does cast revealing illumination on his art. His emotional and physical closeness to men is axiomatic in the large number of his pictures most comfortably viewing a male world. But he also masked his inner life of self-dubiousness and psychic pain by painting their opposite: cheerful and upbeat images depicting Boy Scouts instead of demons.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/books/american-mirror-about-norman-rockwell-by-deborah-solomon.html
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