Norman Rockwell
It’s the 4th of July, and the NY Times runs a big article on Norman Rockwell to show its “real American” creds.

My! How things have changed over the course of my lifetime! It used to be that a comparison to Norman Rockwell was the height of abuse and insult among artists. I remember in 1982, Roy Slade, then the president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, came into my studio and turned all of my paintings upside down and declared, “This is like Norman Rockwell!” He did not mean that as a compliment. Critics in those days loathed Rockwell as the antithesis of everything modern.
Today, we are informed that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas collect his work. That high temple of modernist abstraction designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to house Hedda Rebay’s Kandinskys, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, devoted its spiral ramp to exhibiting Norman Rockwell’s work a few years ago. Now critics are comparing his work favorably to Vermeer and Watteau.

Both the praise and the damnation have one big thing in common. They are both excessive and disproportionate. Norman Rockwell was never the enemy of modern art, and he ain’t no Vermeer either.

He was a brilliant and incredibly successful popular illustrator, and never claimed to be anything else. He never claimed to be a fine artist in any way, shape, or fashion. He always described himself as what he was, a commercial illustrator specializing in magazine covers. His work was always tremendously popular over many decades of a long career.

That achievement is no small thing. He worked as a fairly successful magazine illustrator since World War I. The height of his career began in the course of World War II with his covers for The Saturday Evening Post. The demand for his work remained high and only increased through the 1950s. To give you an idea of the scope of that achievement, think of what Rockwell, a painter, competed with in those days. First, he had to compete with the big glossy picture