Norman Rockwell: A Life

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Boy Scout campouts, backyard barbecues, Christmas trees, cheerful barbers: no artist quite converted slice-of-life realism into idealized portraits of the American dream as ably as Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), whose distinguished career art historian Laura Claridge captures just as ably in this welcome biography.

Rockwell, Claridge writes, had ambitions to be considered a great artist, but he abandoned them early on in the struggle to make a living through his abilities as an illustrator. He need not have worried about money quite as much as he did, Claridge suggests, for over his long career he produced more than 4,000 paintings and earned millions of dollars; still, as we learn, Rockwell was a complicated man, beset by all sorts of worries and more expressive on canvas than he ever was in the ordinary situations of life. His patriotic style evolved through his long engagement with the Saturday Evening Post, whose editor, George Horace Lorimer, used "as an instrument of Americanization," a means of establishing a national identity and ideals of "an American community made safe by a shared vision of right and wrong." In this and much else, Rockwell excelled, achieving early and lasting success though never earning much respect from critics and other arbiters of taste--even though, Claridge notes, Rockwell had all the requisite irony, and certainly all the necessary skills.

FROM OUR EDITORS

For many of us, Norman Rockwell is American art. His simple, comforting, and often patriotic images enchanted Americans for 60 years. Yet he had never been the subject of a major biography -- until Laura Claridge's authoritative look at the man behind the icon, drawing on previously unpublished family archives and many new interviews with important Rockwell sources. Was Rockwell the man reflected in his art? Or was there something darker lurking just below the surface?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Norman Rockwell's hundreds of memorable covers for The Saturday Evening Post made him a twentieth-century American icon. However, because of the very popularity and accessibility of his idealized depictions of middle-class life, his more serious paintings have been largely ignored, and he has often been deemed not a "real" artist but a mere illustrator." Symptomatic of Rockwell's critical neglect is the fact that he has never been the subject of a serious, comprehensive biography. In Norman Rockwell, Laura Claridge breaks new ground with her appreciative but clear-eyed view of Rockwell's art - and his life. Based upon previously unpublished family archives - including the artist's personal journal, newly discovered by the author - as well as hundreds of freshly conducted interviews, this account is especially enriched by the full cooperation of Rockwell's three sons.

SYNOPSIS

Norman Rockwell's tremendously successful, prolific career as a painter and illustrator has rendered him a twentieth-century American icon.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

Are you sitting down? It is now officially hip to like Norman Rockwell. So says Laura Claridge in her new critical biography of small-town America￯﾿ﾽs favorite artist, and she appears to be right on the money. The first full-scale retrospective of Rockewell's work in three decades is currently making the rounds of major museums, winding up this November at New York City￯﾿ﾽs Guggenheim Museum, the Taj Mahal of establishment-sanctioned art-world trendiness. What￯﾿ﾽs more, Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, the handsome book that serves as the catalog of the show, is graced with essays in which such impeccably OK critics and curators as Dave Hickey and Robert Rosenblum compare the painter of "Saying Grace" to William Hogarth, Piet Mondrian, Cy Twombly and Jan Vermeer. This is Norman Rockwell we￯﾿ﾽre talking about, the pipe-smoking magazine illustrator whose Saturday Evening Post covers and Boy Scout calendars remain to this day universally recognized icons of all-American wholesomeness. You can't make a saint without a hagiography, and Norman Rockwell is nothing if not admiring, albeit in the newfangled intellectual way rather than the old-fashioned middlebrow way. Starting with her very first sentence, "Norman Rockwell was not sadistic," Claridge goes in for high-voltage psychobiography, and she also falls victim on occasion to the chummy, cloying look-at-me confessionalism so beloved of cultural-studies wonks: "To my surprise and chagrin, I ended up falling half in love with my subject￯﾿ﾽand then dumping him in disgust the next day." The good news is that once you scrape away the frosting of fashionable silliness with which this book isencrusted, you will find a solid piece of storytelling, full of facts and written in plain English, not the semiliterate jargon academic art historians love. Moreover, the story turns out to be quite unexpectedly involving, for the poet laureate of the old swimming hole turns out, like most artists, to have led an excruciatingly painful life. Among other things, his first wife insisted on an open marriage, left him for a handsomer man, then drowned herself in the bathtub, while wife number two, a depressive alcoholic, was so regular a visitor to mental institutions that the family finally moved within walking distance of one. As for Rockwell himself, he longed desperately for the respect the critics of his own day declined to grant him. "Just once," he ruefully confessed to his youngest son, "I￯﾿ﾽd like for someone to tell me that they think Picasso is good, and that I am, too." Twenty-three years after his death, he has gotten his wish, though one suspects he would have seen through the hyperbolic praise of his latter-day admirers and winced at their poorly hidden agendas. It speaks volumes that Andy Warhol, the wizard of camp, claimed to be a Rockwell fan. The greatest irony of all, of course, is that at his occasional best, Rockwell really was worthy of comparison to the Dutch genre painters of the seventeenth century, such as Pieter de Hooch, whose work he admired and emulated. In such poignantly understated Post covers as "Shuffleton￯﾿ﾽs Barbershop" (1950) and "Breaking Home Ties" (1954), Rockwell managed to shake off the easy, jokey charm of his better-known canvases and cut straight to the heart of the matter. Though Claridge is not an art critic by training (she used to be a professor of English literature at the U.S. Naval Academy), she recognizes that these Rockwells are the real right thing and puts their considerable virtues in intelligent perspective. "Finally," she says of "Shuffleton￯﾿ﾽs Barbershop," "he had created a powerful painting whose impact lies in the details that overwhelm in exactly the right way, in their potency. The inevitable final moment in which Rockwell compulsively adds the overkill to most of his paintings, pushing the portrait into caricature partly to avoid being judged as a serious artist, never occurred in this painting." That gives the game away. At first glance, Claridge appears to buy into the postmodern argument that Rockwell was good precisely because he wasn't serious. "Earnest art critics," she writes, "eager to determine a respectable way to include him anew in the art histories of the twentieth century, find themselves mesmerized by the prospect of wedding popular to postmodern: perhaps Norman Rockwell's decades of sentimental, narrative painting prophesied the postmodern brilliance of marrying high and low culture; maybe Rockwell was pomo in spite of himself." Whether or not she wants to admit it, though, Claridge clearly knows just how good Rockwell was￯﾿ﾽand wasn￯﾿ﾽt￯﾿ﾽand that knowledge is what makes her book worth reading. To be sure, it would have been better if she had spent more time talking about Rockwell the sometimes-compelling artist and less time rhapsodizing over the "hip, intellectually engaged graduate school scholars" whose praise of Rockwell says more about them than about him. But for all its undeniable weaknesses, Norman Rockwell, like its subject, deserves to be taken seriously. Z￯﾿ﾽTerry Teachout

Publishers Weekly