Rockwell’s principles

Garrison Keillor gives Norman Rockwell a spirited defense in his NTYBR review of Deborah Solomon’s American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell .

Rockwell, Keillor , writes, “believed that a painting was more than color and form, that it needed to carry a story ‘The story is the first thing and the last thing,’ he said and so he painted very few landscapes. He was a meticulous painter of faces, and he toiled long days to get the expressions right, working from photographs of models, directing them as if for a movie, sketching draft after draft, expressing ‘his interior visions with a level of preciseness that made his painted world all the more compelling.’ At a time when painters were making big bold swashes and dripping paint on canvas, trying to make art by sheer force, Rockwell was working up close, ever meticulous. His heroes were Pieter Bruegel, whose ‘Peasant Dance’ (a reproduction) hung over Rockwells mantel, and the Dutch masters. He wanted to make ordinary American scenes as Rembrandt might have painted them.”

He could have done Abstract Expressivism if he had wanted: “For his painting ‘The Connoisseur,’ of a gray-haired gent in an art museum, Rockwell created a very respectable imitation Pollock for the gent to stand looking at he put a canvas on his studio floor and dripped paint on it, ‘meticulously recreating an image of freewheeling spontaneity.’ Rockwell enjoyed doing a Pollock he respected Abstract Expressionism and said that, if he were young, he might well paint that way.”

What finally stood in the way of was Rockwell’s famed modest. Rockwell could try out a Pollock; but can we imagine the reverse: “Why would such an enormous ego stoop to parody and go to all the trouble of getting the details right?”