Firstly, I love Norman Rockwell.
When I was a kid, I used to go into Barnes and Noble and attempt to explain to my parents that it was imperative that whatever mammoth-sized tome of Norman Rockwell paintings was laying about absolutely had to come home with me. And they weren't hard to find. I haven't flipped through those books in a while, but I still consider myself a fan. So when it was mentioned to me recently that Norman Rockwell has gotten something of a bad wrap for for painting what is considered trite Americana, my emotions were aroused.
Oh, the injustice of success! To cast aside these aspersions against the innocent, I shall attempt to revisit some of the things that drew me to N. Rock. in the first place and why he continues to kick butt.
Exhibit A. Faces
My ten-year self was v. impressed with the way Norman Rockwell could paint people. I had the darndest time making the people in my youthful drawings look different. It's like - all/most people have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc. and in your head, you know what an eye looks like, so you draw two of those, and you know more or less what a mouth looks like so you stick one of those on around where it should be. And no one can draw noses, so you do your best there and then oh look. All these people could be clones.
But Norman Rockwell, artiste extraordinaire, did not have this problem! Ok, so there is a Norman Rockwell face. You can picture it in your head with the expressive hopeful eyes and thin nose and ruddy cheeks, but you can tell the people in his paintings apart - especially in his later paintings. The awe this inspired in my ten year old self has not yet worn off.
For example:
Yes, they are wasp-y, but look how expressive they are too. The man obviously has technical skill.
Exhibit B. Details, details, details
There's never a boring part of a Norman Rockwell painting. Something is always happening in every corner.
Take this, for instance:
It's not just about a sailor hitting on a cute blonde. He's got all the old men coming over to the window to watch and the emotional lives of all the people crossing the street. Incidentally, this is one of the few paintings with a little self-portrait of the man himself.
So maybe if he'd zoomed in on the little romantic scene, you'd look at this picture and think, "yeah, yeah sailors hit on anything with legs (or so I've heard)," but now you've got the pedestrians thinking that already for you. And the guys up in the office thinking damn I remember when I could hit on hotties - too bad I'm old now. And one of them has a slingshot?! What's'a matter? Jealous? And just looking at it tells you New York - the little bit of taxi, the throng of pedestrians finally getting to cross the street, and, if you still weren't sure, the street signs.
And all of that is where you get Americana. He makes it not just about the individual, but about our relationships and how we're connected, and I think that connection is why his paintings have that feel-good aspect to them. He painted an America that was about community, rather than just that rugged individualism we go on about.
Exhibit C. The Moment
Henri Cartier-Bresson writes about the decisive moment in photography where you manage to capture in one split second a moment that speaks to an entire story, like that guy about to make a splash of a calm puddle. Painting, though, has the luxury of arranging itself just so to collect just the right images to define a feeling or capture a moment. There's a lot of symbolic painting, obviously, that really goes to town with that - take all of surrealism, for example.
Norman Rockwell, though, has this amazing ability to recognize important moments in people's lives and then translate that into an almost (but not quite) photo-realistic painting that captures all of it and makes it seem familiar.
For example:
Now, some people want to say that Norman Rockwell is cheesy and trite. I take issue with that. These iconic images only seem old hat now because Norman Rockwell got them so right the first time. He got it. And he put it onto canvas. And when those images were plastered the country over on the front of the Saturday Evening Post, he defined America.
I don't want to point any fingers, but, if you need to be reminded, this is more like trite:
Not Norman Rockwell.
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