"Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction
to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided
twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star
illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century,
Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the
we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy
Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up
to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges
walking into an all-white school--here was an America whose citizens
seemed to believe in equality and gladness for all.
Who was this man who served as our unofficial "artist in chief" and
bolstered our country's national identity? Behind the folksy,
pipe-smoking facade lay a surprisingly complex figure--a lonely painter
who suffered from depression and was consumed by a sense of inadequacy.
He wound up in treatment with the celebrated psychoanalyst Erik Erikson.
In fact, Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts so that he and his
wife could be near Austen Riggs, a leading psychiatric hospital. "What's
interesting is how Rockwell's personal desire for inclusion and normalcy
spoke to the national desire for inclusion and normalcy," writes
Solomon. "His work mirrors his own temperament--his sense of humor, his
fear of depths--and struck Americans as a truer version of themselves
than the sallow, solemn, hard-bitten Puritans they knew from
eighteenth-century portraits."
Deborah Solomon, a biographer and art critic, draws on a wealth of
unpublished letters and documents to explore the relationship between
Rockwell's despairing personality and his genius for reflecting
America's brightest hopes. "The thrill of his work," she writes, "is
that he was able to use a commercial form [that of magazine
illustration] to thrash out his private obsessions." In American
Mirror, Solomon trains her perceptive eye not only on Rockwell and his
art but on the development of visual journalism as it evolved from
illustration in the 1920s to photography in the 1930s to television in
the 1950s. She offers vivid cameos of the many famous Americans whom
Rockwell counted as friends, including President Dwight Eisenhower, the
folk artist Grandma Moses, the rock musician Al Kooper, and the
generation of now-forgotten painters who ushered in the Golden Age of
illustration, especially J. C. Leyendecker, the reclusive legend who
created the Arrow Collar Man.
Although derided by critics in his lifetime as a mere illustrator whose
work could not compete with that of the Abstract Expressionists and
other modern art movements, Rockwell has since attracted a passionate
following in the art world. His faith in the power of storytelling puts
his work in sync with the current art scene. American Mirror
brilliantly explains why he deserves to be remembered as an American
master of the first rank.
