The lull time between Christmas and New Year’s is also a good time for reading, so I alternatively read Between the Woods and the Water, the second part of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s remarkable travels on foot in Europe in 1934, and American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (2013) by Deborah Solomon.
I picked up the latter at Half-Price Books not long ago after reading a bit of it in the store, and realizing that I knew next to nothing about Rockwell, besides what his paintings look like, and that he’s been the subject of revisionism lately. Maybe more than one cycle of scorn and then revision have come and gone, for all I know.
Solomon skillfully makes the case that Rockwell’s work is well worth thoughtful attention. “Each of his Post covers amounts to a one-frame story complete with a protagonist and a plot…” she writes. “In some ways, Rockwell’s paintings, which are grounded in the rendering of the particulars, demand to be ‘read’ like a story. The experience they offer is literary as much as visual, in the sense that he cared less about the sensual dazzle of oil paint than the construction of a seamless narrative. The public that saw and appreciated his paintings walked away from them thinking not about the dominance of cerulean blue or cadmium yellow but about the kid on the twenty-foot-high diving board up in the sky, terrified as he peers over the edge and realizes there is only one way down.”
As for Rockwell the man, he comes off as a decidedly odd duck. An enormously talented odd duck. While perhaps not the most colorful of personalities — which is often just a way of denoting a jerk, anyway — he’s worth reading about too. (Then again, his family might have had some thoughts on Rockwell as a jerk.)
“On most days, he felt lonesome and loveless,” notes Solomon. “His relationships with his parents, wives, and three sons were uneasy, sometimes to the point of estrangement. He eschewed organized activity. He declined to go to church. For decades he had a lucrative gig providing an annual painting for the Boy Scouts calendar, but he didn’t serve as a troop leader or have his own children join the Scouts.
“He was more than a bit obsessive. A finicky eater whose preferred dessert was vanilla ice cream, he once made headlines by decrying the culinary fashion for parsley. He wore his shoes too small. Phobic about dirt and germs, he cleaned his studio several times a day. He washed his brushes and even the surfaces of his paintings with Irovy soap.”
Naturally the book is well illustrated with his work, though only a fraction of (say) his Saturday Evening Post covers, since he did so many (323 from 1916 to 1963). That made me look up more images posted by the Rockwell museums, one in western Massachusetts, another in Vermont (seemingly more of a store for Rockwelliana), both places that he lived. Just more things to see if I ever make it back that way.
