{"id":1792,"date":"2010-07-01T12:32:29","date_gmt":"2010-07-01T19:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp\/2010\/07\/norman_rockwell_-_the_muffling\/"},"modified":"2010-07-01T12:32:29","modified_gmt":"2010-07-01T19:32:29","slug":"norman_rockwell_-_the_muffling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/2010\/07\/norman_rockwell_-_the_muffling.html","title":{"rendered":"Norman Rockwell – the muffling effect"},"content":{"rendered":"

Norman Rockwell was the great illustrator of mid-20th Century American complacency. His work is a siren call for the right, most recently expressed<\/a> by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times:<\/p>\n

Norman Rockwell’s cheerful America has lately acquired a startling
\nrelevance both inside and outside the art world, in part because it
\nsymbolizes an era when connectivity did not require a USB cable…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Rockwell’s paintings are easy to recognize. In the years surrounding World War II his covers for The Saturday Evening Post depicted America as a small-town utopia where people are consistently decent and possess great reserves of fellow-feeling. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students cherish their teachers and remember their birthdays. Citizens at town hall meetings stand up and speak their mind without getting booed or shouted down by gun-toting rageaholics.<\/p>\n

 This is America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity. Rockwell’s scenes of the small and the local speak to us in the age of the global because they offer a fantasy of civic togetherness that today seems increasingly remote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

America before the fall? Maybe. Eve’s apple came from the tree of knowledge. Our fabled first parents were doing fine as long as they stayed stupid. One bite of reality, and the illusion of a garden dissolved. (As for small-town American utopias, there’s more reality in a page from Babbitt<\/i><\/a> than in a roomful of Rockwell’s.)<\/p>\n

To be moved by Rockwell requires a willful narrowing. America in the 1950s was a reasonably decent place if you were middle-class, mentally secure, easily amused and incurious about the lives of others. The Civil Rights Movement and the student rebellions it spawned on university campuses burst those bubbles. A half a century later, the right is still trying to reconstruct them. Despite its efforts, we’ve come a long way since racism, sexism and homophobia were the unchallenged backdrop of American life. <\/p>\n

Rockwell painted a celebratory version of ignorance. (If I cannot see you, you cannot be you.) The doctor’s never drunk on a home visit, the priest is not fondling the boys, and the father is never flashing his strap. Above all, women know their place, and black people are content to root around in the shadows.<\/p>\n

Image via<\/a><\/p>\n

\"NormanRockturkey.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Solomon: <\/p>\n

It is true that (Rockwell’s) work does not acknowledge social hardships or
\ninjustice. It does not offer a sustained meditation on heartbreak or
\ndeath. Yet why should it? Idealization has been a reputable tradition in
\nart at least since the days when the Greeks put up the Parthenon, and
\nRockwell’s work is no more unrealistic than that of countless
\nart-history legends, like Mondrian, whose geometric compositions
\nexemplify an ideal of harmony and calm, or Watteau, who invented the
\ngenre of the f\u00eate galante.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She’s confusing a search for a root ideal with propaganda. To celebrate a fundamental grace, be it in mathematics or the flounce of a lady’s skirt, is not the same as a cover-up. The first shines, the second rots under its false premises. What Candide<\/a> concluded about the promises of Pangloss is true of Rockwell’s American Dream: ” It is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.” It is an inability to recognize that being born into a favored group is not the same as creating favored circumstances. <\/p>\n

Rockwell opens tomorrow at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norman Rockwell was the great illustrator of mid-20th Century American complacency. His work is a siren call for the right, most recently expressed by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times: Norman Rockwell’s cheerful America has lately acquired a startling relevance both inside and outside the art world, in part because it symbolizes an era […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}