American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Author: Deborah Solomon | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DA6XJSQ | Format: EPUB
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Description
“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 façade 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Deborah Solomon, a biographer and art critic, draws on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents to explore the relationship between Rockwell’s despairing personality and his genius for reflecting America’s brightest hopes.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.
- File Size: 11482 KB
- Print Length: 512 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 5, 2013)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DA6XJSQ
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #216,834 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #11
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Art > Art History > Regional > United States
- #11
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Art > Art History > Regional > United States
This is a sort-of biography of Norman Rockwell. Sort-of in the sense that its far more a collection of Deborah Solomon's opinions, interpretations and subjective analysis of Rockwell than it is a book about Rockwell. Rockwell is given the bug-on-a-slide treatment by an author dripping with condesenction. The introduction reads as if she is trying to explain to her friends why she would waste her time on such an undeserving subject.
We get a sort of chronological overview of his life mixed up with amature psychoanalysis of the most predictable and pedestrian variety. She finds anxiety. She finds obsessive-compulsive disorders. And following the pattern he was distant to his wives and children. And by giving him and his work a disturbed psychological subtext, he can be somewhat rehabilitated into the pantheon of artists.
There are interesting bits and pieces in the book. But they are only found after walking through mountains of trash. Art Historians by training who do biography seem inevitably to produce works far more dedicated to their own opinions rather than the subject of the book. She writes far too romantically about the "art world" for example. The "art world" is not primarily about meaningful context, judgement of works or understanding of works in the context of other works. The "art world" is about commerce and as much about selling the "personality" of the artist as it is the art. Its about making money for gallery owners and being good at parties. The author, by her background, obviously knows better. But still writes the romance view of the art world.
Solomon's fault as a writer is mostly a lack of any sort of originality in her analysis. The book, its opinions and its interpretations are utterly predictable from beginning to end.
Forget the controversy for a moment. Looking at the book strictly from a literary standpoint, quite a lot of the writing is poor, clumsy and absurd. Solomon's observations of the art are sometimes laughable - for instance her assessment of Saying Grace (the painting that just sold at Sotheby's for 46 million) she describes the "TNARU", the last part of the Restaurant sign in the window - Solomon likens this to cubist lettering or perhaps an anagram of UN-ART or even better, a secret message of U R AN ANT (She can't seem to remember Norman Rockwell did not paint in the context of today's texting language, he painted this back in the 50's). Solomon cannot grasp the artistic mind - very simply the "TNARU" spelled backwards in the window is an even better design element and visual if not seen in it's entirety. Her assessment of No Swimming (1921) is ludicrous - instead of just seeing that it is clearly a story of some boys swimming where they shouldn't have been been and getting chased by an authority of some sort - Solomon muses, "Various scenarios are imaginable. Perhaps the boys are playing hooky from school. Or perhaps they violated Prohibition and bought a bottle of something alcoholic." Really? Only in Solomon's fevered imagination. No one else sees these ridiculous scenarios.
And throughout, her prose is painfully awkward - she mentions Rockwell's image of the city (see his Autobiography) a woman brandishing an umbrella and hitting a man with it in a vacant lot - but then she ruins this powerful imagery with "as if the woman were the evil twin of the Statue of Liberty". Huh? I found myself commenting on the margins about the absurdity of so many of Solomon's observations, judgements and assessments. And some of the reviewers find this intelligent prose?
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