The Rembrandt of Punkin Crick

By ROBERT HUGHES

Norman Normal, such was his image: the Rembrandt of Punkin Crick, as one critic rather sourly called him, the folksy poet of a way of American life that slipped away as he set it down. "I do ordinary people in everyday situations," Norman Rockwell once declared, "and that's about all I can do." From the day in 1916 when he walked apprehensively into the offices of the Saturday Evening Post--already a magazine circulating 2 million copies a week--carrying a velvet-wrapped bundle of paintings and sketches to show to Editor George Lorimer, Rockwell was greeted by nothing but success. He began his career as a professional artist at a time when large-scale magazine color illustration, thanks to radically improved printing technology, had become one of the keys to mass culture--the television, one might say, of pre-electronic America. It was the illustrators' moment; born into it, Rockwell kept climbing. By 1920 he was the Post's star draftsman. By 1925 he had become a national name, and by the end of the Depression he was an American institution: it is unprovable, but probable, that Rockwell's images did more to bolster the assaulted values of American bourgeois life after the Crash than all the politicians' speeches lumped together.

When he died last week at 84 in his home in Stockbridge, Mass., Norman Rockwell shared with Walt Disney the extraordinary distinction of being one of the two artists familiar to nearly everyone in the U.S., rich or poor, black or white, museumgoer or not, illiterate or Ph.D. To a tiny minority of these people, Rockwell was a kitsch factory, turning out relentlessly sentimental icons of mid-cult virtue--family, kids, dogs and chickens, apple pie, Main Street and the flag--in the corniest of retardataire styles. But to most of them, Rockwell was a master: sane (unlike Van Gogh), comprehensible (unlike Picasso), modest (unlike Dali), and perfectly attuned to what they wanted in a picture.

A picture, not a painting. Rockwell's reputation was not made by museums and could not have been. He lived at a time when museum art tended to intimidate or bore the mass audience. His work addressed its vast public through reproduction. It was seen, not as painting, but as windows opening onto slices of life. Its minute verisimilitude--as well as the ham-actor exaggeration of every wink, scowl, smirk or pout on the faces of its characters--was designed to be transposed into a mass medium, to survive the passage into ink compressed but unharmed. Rockwell's best illustrations tend to have the depthless narrative clarity of a TV image, which is also the clarity of popular art. His design has a coarse, efficient impact on the eye, but what gripped his audience was his ravenous and unselective appetite for the surface of things. Every hair of every mutt got its share of picturesque completeness. So his work acquired the same kind of relationship (or lack of it) to modern art that scale modeling has to sculpture. Not one shape had any aesthetic interest, but the level of effort was as unstinting as the craftsmanship. Besides, the pictures were funny and corny. Nothing ironic, no bitterness, a mild poking of fun at human foibles, never subversive nuance or a flick of indignation. What you got was what you saw. Rockwell took pains to ensure an absolute authenticity of detail-costumes, furniture, every object just right for period and wear; and no other artist in America had his knack of making a chicken stand still to be painted. (You rocked it back and forth, he explained for a minute or two, and that hypnotized it for five minutes.)

Yet this patient observation served to describe a dreamworld of small-town America. His paintings are not so much representations of reality as commercials for it. What they offer is Arcadia. In Rockwell's America, old people were no thrust like palsied, incontinent vegetables into nursing homes by their indifferent offspring; they stayed basking in respect on the porch, apple-cheeked and immorally spry. Kids did not snort angel dust and get one another pregnant; they stole apples and swam in forbidden water holes, but said grace before meals. All soldiers were nice kids from next door; all politicians were benevolent or harmlessly jumbling (though Rockwell, faced with the task of committing Spiro Agnew to canvas for the cover of TV Guide, once alowed that the discredited Veep was not quite his type); the great fact of society was the continuity of the family, generation on generation. It was a world unmarked by doubt, violence and greed. The mountainous Thanksgiving turkey that appears in Freedom from Want, 1943, is an image of virtuous abundance rather than extravagance, a puritan tone confirmed by the glasses of plain water on the table.

Propagated through 317 Saturday Evening Post covers and countless other illustrations, this consoling fiction made Rockwell seem a reticent monument of Americanism. In 1976, more than 10,000 spectators and 2,000 participants turned out for a Rockwell parade during the Bicentennial in Stockbridge, where he lived with his third wife Molly Punderson; for an hour and a half, float after float passed by, each bearing tableaux representing his most popular illustrations--the Four Freedoms, the Boy Scouts, the doctor solemnly examining a girl's broken doll, the returning G.I. Corny, certainly; but no American artist had ever received such an affecting tribute. By then Rockwell had outlived his subject matter, a fact that his fundamental decency did not permit him to ignore. "I really believed," he said six years earlier, "that the war against Hitler would bring the Four Freedoms to everyone. But I couldn't paint that today. I just don't believe it. I was doing this best-possible-world, Santa-down-the-chimney, lovely-kids-adoring-their-kindly-grandpa sort of thing. And I liked it, but now I'm sick of it." In the '60s, glimpses of a less Arcadian society surfaced in his work--most memorably, an illustration of U.S. marshals escorting a small black girl to school in Little Rock, Ark. But these did not represent the essential Rockwell as far as his public was concerned. What they wanted was a friendly world, shielded from the calamities of history and the endemic doubts that are the modernist heritage, set down in detail, painted as an honest grocer weighs ham, slice by slice, nothing skimped; and Norman Rockwell gave it to them for 60 years. He never made an impression on the history of art, and never will. But on the history of illustration and mass communication his mark was deep, and will remain indelible.

Robert Hughes

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