James Parker reviews Deborah Solomon’s American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, which tells the story of how “this rather strange, marginal-feeling man contrived to represent the inner life of a mass audience” – a less straightforward portrayal of “simpler times” than you might surmise:
The secret, clearly, is that Rockwell’s productions, his tableaux of American innocence, are not
simple at all. If they were, we would have forgotten them by now. Instead they are loaded with unconscious energy, with nervous hum and erogenous gleam. The grotesque, like some goblin field of gravity, seems to bend and warp even his most conventional subjects. Shiny noses, stringy throats, eyes too avid or too dull; a freakish quiddity in his rendering of shoes, elbows, baskets, bricks. Which to us, post-Freudians that we all inevitably are, can mean only one thing: repression! Rockwell’s preference for the company of boy models and rugged apprentices over that of, say, women is a recurring note in Solomon’s book. (“Draws Boys Not Girls” was the headline of a 1923 Boston Globe article.) He married unhappily, twice, and more happily a third time. And although his demons were not very sulphurous, not very rock-and-roll, they were demons nonetheless: shame, awkwardness, a cyclical sense of his own artistic insufficiency, and an enormous, hellacious self-imposed pressure to get everything right.
And about that repression:
If he was gay, he was never—on the evidence currently available—actively so. Solomon’s point is more that he wasn’t gay, he wasn’t anything. He hovered fraughtly, jamming his canvases with inference. Of his habit of placing a dog, person, hatbox, or similar item in the foreground of his paintings, between the viewer and the action, she writes: “It is one of the tensions in Rockwell’s art. He paints objects with the kind of fastidious realism intended to bring you closer to the touchable, handleable world. But then he paints a barricade in the foreground to keep you from touching. He cannot allow himself to touch what he wants.”
Ben Davis emphasizes the way the new biography shows the paradoxical relationship of the artist’s life to his work:
What drama there is comes not from the incidents of Rockwell’s life but from how, in Solomon’s telling, everything in his art actually represents its opposite. Rockwell created the imagery of the Boy Scouts—his most lucrative and long-lasting gig was for the annual Boy Scout calendar—but he was himself not particularly outdoorsy, a neat freak who couldn’t bear to get dirty. He created memorable images of piety (Saying Grace, 1951), but his clan was uninterested in religion; captured scenes of scampy rebellion (The Shiner, 1954) but was rule-bound and order-obsessed; and, most damningly, painted odes to family togetherness (The Homecoming, 1948) but was so affectionless that his own family despaired of ever knowing him. His first bride, Irene O’Connor, divorced him in 1930 on grounds of “mental cruelty;” his second wife, Mary Barstow, was driven to alcoholism and finally the mental hospital by his remove. Only his third wife, Molly Punderson, whom he met when he was 65 and she 64, seems to have been a fit, and they slept in separate beds. “At last he had found his feminine ideal,” Solomon writes: “an elderly schoolteacher who was unlikely to make sexual demands on him.”
Recent Dish on Rockwell here and here.
(Image of Scout at Ship’s Wheel, Rockwell’s first published magazine cover illustration, from the September 1913 cover of Boys’ Life, via Wikimedia Commons)
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