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The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
November 2013
On Sale: November 5, 2013
512 pages
ISBN: 0374113092
EAN: 9780374113094
Kindle: B00DA6XJSQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
"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wealth of unpublished letters and documents to explore the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.
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