The Norman Rockwell Touring Exhibit
For those of us who would rejoice if a Richter nine earthquake hit New York City's Museum of Modern Art at 3 AM on a Sunday morning, the Norman Rockwell exhibit is a delight. It is on tour. For the next month, it is in Nashville. In late 2015, it will be at Brigham Young University.
Norman Rockwell for six decades was America's most beloved painter. His paintings appeared on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies' Home Journal, and Boys' Life, the scouting magazine. No American painter ever had a wider audience. No American painter ever touched the lives of as many people. He had an uncanny ability to know what Americans wanted to see, wanted to believe, and wanted to experience for themselves.
He was a gifted painter technically. You know exactly what his paintings are about. You do not have to impute meaning to his paintings out of your own baffled entrails.
No status-seeking, middle-aged wife with a college degree in art history ever dragged her rich husband to an exhibition of Norman Rockwell paintings.
No husband ever stood in front of a Rockwell painting, wondering what the painting was of, let alone what it means.
Beauty has been in the eyes of tens of millions of Rockwell beholders for over a century.
Rockwell's paintings are idealizations. He used photography to help him compose some of the paintings, but I don't think that any photographer, not even Ansel Adams, could have produced photographs with the kind of emotional recognition and delight that Rockwell created with his paintings. This is what I mean by saying that they were idealizations. They were more than color, shape, and scene. They were realistic, in the sense that anyone looking at them can instantly understand what they were about, yet a photograph with the same lighting, the same colors, and same composition would attract little attention. A photograph would look staged. It would lack intimacy. It would not connect with the viewer emotionally in the same way that a Rockwell painting did for decades. A photograph represents what is. A Rockwell painting represents what ought to be more often.
THE CULTURE WARS
One of the most endearing aspects of Norman Rockwell is the contempt that defenders of modern art have for his work. They despise his work. They should. They regard him as a sentimentalist. He was. They regard him as the incarnation of the American middle class before the counter-culture of the late 1960s. He was. They regard him as an enemy of everything ugly, revolutionary, and defiant of middle-class values. He was.
The incarnations of 20th-century painting were Pablo Picasso and Norman Rockwell. I imagine an artistic challenge to the two of them. Each of them would be commissioned to do a painting of a photograph of both of them together. Each of them would have a choice as to the composition of the photograph. I think Rockwell would have chosen a photograph of each of them with his arm around the other, smiling, each with his free hand holding up a paintbrush. Picasso would have chosen a photograph of the two of them standing next to each other, scowling, arms at their sides.
Then he would have turned it over to WeeGee for final editing.
The battle for Western civilization is conducted on many battlefields. Art is one of them. Painting in the 20th century revealed the nature of this battlefield better than any other medium. Here, the artists' view of the world is represented.
Modern art is committed to a view of the world which says that the world is essentially random and without meaning, especially ethical meaning. Then, once the rootless literati have persuaded very rich men, with money to spare, of the truth of this outlook, they take it to the next stage: the world is ethically perverse. Picasso is the incarnation of this view. Picasso was the self-conscious enemy of all civilization, not merely Western.
The best book on Picasso is Degenerate Moderns.
Those of us who truly despise Picasso in the same way that degenerate moderns despise Rockwell understand the nature of this war. I don't think most Americans do. They know that Picasso's paintings stink, and they know they love Rockwell's paintings, but that is about the extent of it. They suspect that Picasso and his peers have run a gigantic sucker's operation on the rich, which is true enough. They suspect that this is a variation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the emperor who had no clothes. But this is being too kind. It is more like the case of the hustlers selling the emperor a flasher's trench coat laced with anthrax, and then sending him into the crowd to show his stuff.
I think the essence of the cultural schizophrenia of the patrons of the arts in America is seen on the Web page describing the Rockwell exhibit. Towards the lower left-hand section of the page we read this: "The Frist Center for the Visual Arts gratefully acknowledges our Picasso Circle Members as Exhibition Patrons." I am glad to see that the Picasso Circle members found something useful to do with their money. I thoroughly enjoyed the subsidy. Thanks, guys!
If you are a Rockwell fan, buy a copy of the coffee table book, Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers. It is the only book on my coffee table.