Norm!

Some friends and I found ourselves at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, recently. Norm has been a favorite target of highbrow critics because he was primarily an illustrator - someone they'd consider more of a craftsman. I'm certainly always willing to engage in more detailed debate on the subject of who is and isn't an artist, and what is or isn't art, but it does seem to me that people who sneer at Rockwell do it not because of their sophistication, but mostly because of plain old elitism. It's hard to deny what he did in the visual medium was pretty important in American culture, and hard to say that Pollock or Nieman are artists while Rockwell's not. His major failing in the eyes of the critical seems to be that he actually liked people and portrayed most of his subjects sympathetically. Is he a Capital A Artist? Hey, I don't know. It depends what you think art is. All I know is: he's no diesel engine mechanic.

The paintings were great to see in person. There were the touchstones, of course: Freedom of Speech. Hard not to get chills at that one. I loved this painting: The Lineman. Had never seen it before, and it's a remarkable American painting, showing what kind of work Norm might have done if he hadn't been gainfully employed. Freedom From Want is a bit more complex for me; in my opinion, it's one of the most subversive and creepiest paintings ever. The gray-haired grandma setting the turkey down on the table? She's actually the cook -- yes, a member of the family staff, who is spending her Thanksgiving serving food to a shined-up group of automatons. An employee. When you look at the family's faces, you realize that no one is actually looking at any other person. An unearthly, pale light illuminates the faces from underneath and gives the eyes a carnivorous glow. The hungry grins on the faces give them an air of ill-restrained greed. I'm not sure the motives behind this depiction of Thanksgiving are 100% wholesome.

People see what they want to see - maybe that was Norman's problem. It was interesting to walk among these iconic paintings and listen to the reactions of the enthusiastic public. This museum is unique in that most people have already seen these works reproduced. They are mother's milk. The public was certainly not arriving expecting to be surprised or challenged. To the museum's credit, the incredibly clearly written and interesting labels did everything they could to bring new information and depth to the paintings. So did the docents who were arrayed throughout the galleries. For instance, a friend pointed out to me the label on The Marriage License, a painting of a town clerk signing a flushed young couple up. The label said that the real clerk, the model for the painting, had lost his wife just a week before the sketch was made. On reading this, the cleark's fallen expression and lack of eye contact ceased to be a comical depiction of small-town deseutude, and started to look more like the isolation of grief. Other paintings took on difficult issues more directly and topically: The Problem We All Live With, Blood Brothers (which I can't find reproduced online, but which depicts two Viet Nam-era soldiers, one black and one white, lying dead in a pool of blood clutching one another), and Christmas in Bethlehem (which shows the brightly glowing ruins with throngs of the faithful praying under a starlit sky -- though you're seeing it all over the shoulders of soldiers, in silhouette in the foreground, carrying machine guns). And yet, despite Rockwell's layered presentations, full of detail and generous hints to the viewer, people still seem unwilling, sometimes, to consider the paintings from unfamiliar angles.

Take for instance Moving Day, which depicts two black children moving into a new house, and three white children sort of facing them, positioned tensely opposite them, on the sidewalk. The day I was at the museum, a well-heeled gentleman in late middle age (whom I will confess to internally characterizing as a fatuous, water buffalo know-it-all dime-store art critic) stood before the painting and said to a docent: "I see common ground. I see hope for the future there. Each group of kids has a baseball glove. Each girl is wearing pink. He's saying, hey, we have our differences but we'll all be able to live together in the same neighborhood." The guide earnestly responded "Those ideas are there, but Rockwell has also put in a number of other details that ask us to question that." He pointed out a shadowed face peeking creepily from behind a curtain in the house next door; the cleanly slicing vertical lines of sidewalk and moving van that divide the canvas between the feet of the two groups of children; the inequality in 3 children facing 2; the unfriendly expressions; the effect of having the two black children surrounded on all sides by the face in the window, the neighborhood, and the three white children blocking the sidewalk.

The guide was saying, as I believe the painting was saying: this stuff isn't so easy. THere are things that unite us, and things that divide us. Things aren't quite as simple as they appear. We want so much to see peace and improvement and reconciliation everywhere; it's just so much more comfortable than recognizing what is truly frightening and sad and ugly abdout human nature and the world. Even Rockwell, as kindly disposed as he was toward humanity and a regular paycheck, was prodded by conscience recognize the realities that need to be addressed, or that should cause us to grieve. Even if you have to look really, really closely to see them.