ROCKWELL-"The Underside of Innocence"

I've just finished reading a fascinating little book on Norman Rockwell. His name is one that has often come up in connection with my work in critiques. No other artist embodies Americana and nostalgia like Norman Rockwell. For his entire life, he struggled to reconcile his place in the art world and his role as an illustrator. His work was so counter to everything that was happening in the Modern Art establishment that he wasn't even considered a real artist, even though his skills for visual story telling are second to none. Today, there is a new found appreciation for his work and his paintings. In particular, there is a realization that he was a lot smarter than we give him credit for.

case in point: Here's "The Art Critic" from the 1950s. Depicted is a young art student at the museum, closely inspecting a broach on the chest of a baroque woman in a painting, who leers back at him- as do a group of disgusted looking men in another painting. While humorous and innocent in Rockwell's stylistic way, it takes on new meaning when learned that his models for the art student and the woman are his son and his wife. In short, he's illustrated the Oedipus story, right down to the mother's broach that Oedipus gauges his eyes with when he realizes that his wife is his mother. Even the disgusted guys in the other painting can see how wrong the whole thing is. Rockwell loved this kind of subtle jabbing, especially the fact that he could put it on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Rockwell also felt deeply insecure about his place in art. He tackles the subject on numerous occasions, but probably most blatantly in "The Connoisseur". For the painting, he mixes his style with that of a Jackson Pollock rip-off, raising all sorts of questions about modern art. He removes the mans face all together, so we can't see his reaction. Instead, the work is a strange mixing of 2 completely opposite approaches to art and Rockwell's way of working out the deep concerns/insecurities about his life's work.

Here's a line from the back of the book:

In this sure-to-be controversial book, Richard Halpern argues that this sense of innocence arises from our reluctance—and also Rockwell’s—to acknowledge the often disturbing dimensions of his works. Rockwell’s paintings frequently teem with perverse acts of voyeurism and desire but contrive to keep these acts invisible—or rather, hidden in plain sight, available for unacknowledged pleasure but easily denied by the viewer.

Rockwell emerges in this book, then, as a deviously brilliant artist, a remorseless diagnostician of the innocence in which we bathe ourselves, and a continuing, unexpected influence on contemporary artists. Far from a banal painter of the ordinary, Halpern argues, Rockwell is someone we have not yet dared to see for the complex creature he is: a wholesome pervert, a knowing innocent, and a kitschy genius.