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Rockwelll rising

"The Rockwell show explores what it means to be commercial art, art for hire, art on demand."

In A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe's best-selling satire of Atlanta's ambitious nouveau riche, the author refers to the High Museum of Art as the city's "pride and joy" and sets a hilarious social event in its elegant interior:

"So many white ramps and railings! So many throats screaming with the euphoria of knowing they had arrived in the one place in all Atlanta where anyone with any social wattage whatsoever was supposed to be on this particular evening ..."

A similar but real-life gathering of Atlanta's social elite took place at the High Museum last November 1.

It was the swankiest event there in years, with the local gentry sweeping in from Peachtree Street in their black ties and designer dresses, passing the Alexander Calder mobile on their way into Richard Meier's white-tile postmodern landmark, and gathering in the atrium for cocktails beneath a four-story abstraction by Sol LeWitt.

All the men in full (and women, too) were there - real estate tycoons and media moguls, smCNN and Delta executives, the plantation rich of the Old South and the dot-com day traders of the New. Tom Cousins, chairman of the museum's Director's Circle and the Atlanta real estate developer rumored to have been the model for Tom Wolfe's character Charlie Croker in A Man in Full, welcomed the guests. Among the glitterati were Ann Cox Chambers, heir to the Cox Communications fortune; Holcombe T. Green Jr., a venture capitalist who is the High's largest benefactor; and, of course, Ned Rifkin, the museum's director. Unbeknown to most, Rifkin was about to desert Atlanta to become director of the Menil Collection in Houston - but, then, that might have spoiled the party.

The All-American decor for the gala seemed strangely at odds with the high-style finery of the guests. Patchwork quilts served as tablecloths for the dinner held next door in the soaring galleria of the Robert Woodruff (read: Coca-Cola) Arts Center. Flags, flowers, and kites served as decorations, while a marching band dressed as clowns provided the background music.

When a gong summoned the guests to dinner, many of the invitees lingered in the galleries. Art is often ignored at art openings, but some folks in Atlanta that night were so attached to the pictures on the walls that they had tears in their eyes.

"I feel like I'm among old friends," sighed one woman.

Monet, Picasso, and abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly have been featured at the High Museum over the last two years. But the show that was causing all the commotion on that November night was a presentation of work by none other than Norman Rockwell.

"Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People" is taking more than Atlanta by storm. Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) is not only bringing in substantial crowds at the High, but the painter who became known for his cornball scenes of small-town life is going national, with a major museum retrospective. The exhibit will hit the road in February, stopping at the Chicago Historical Society, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, and The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, ending up at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Because of the exhibit, Rockwell's name is seemingly everywhere. In a November New Yorker article, critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Rockwell produced images "at once photographically vivid in their details and richly painterly over all." But he also noted the "absolute absence of mystery in his art makes me sick."

PBS recently aired a Rockwell documentary as part of their American Masters series. David Lynch's new film Straight Story is being compared to Rockwell's vision of a kinder, gentler America. Rockwell was the toast of radio shows as well: National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation and Fresh Air, cp9.5WBURcp10.5's The Connection.

Surprisingly, the credit for starting all the buzz over Norman Rockwell does not go to Atlanta's High Museum, where the exhibition debuted, but to an upstart museum located in a renovated post office in a historic suburb of Atlanta. In 1995, officials of the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art hit on the idea of holding a Rockwell show to coincide with Atlanta's 1996 Olympic Games. It seemed reasonable enough, but when museum officials contacted the Rockwell Museum, seeking to borrow paintings for the exhibition, they ran into a roadblock.

Folks in Stockbridge decided to make inquiries into this museum. They called Anne Morgan, a former Rockwell model and resident of Stockbridge who now lives in Atlanta. Morgan, 49, is a professional fund-raiser and knows Atlanta society as well as anyone. She's also the High's former development director.

"I told them if anyone was going to do a Norman Rockwell show in Georgia, it should be the High," says Morgan, seated in the dining room of the Park 25 Restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta, as she studies a menu of home-style food (from squash casserole to apple cake) inspired by the exhibition. The cover of the menu is Rockwell's 1962 The Connoisseur, a gray, balding gent holding a homburg and an umbrella in kid-gloved hands as he studies Rockwell's version of a Jackson Pollock.

Taking Morgan's advice to heart, the Stockbridge museum politely declined to lend its Rockwells for the show. But that didn't stop the Marietta/Cobb Museum; it simply borrowed paintings, posters, and prints from other museums and private collectors. In the end, the show was a major success, drawing close to 80,000 visitors, double the previous year's attendance for the 10-year-old museum.

Fred Bentley Sr., a prominent Atlanta attorney and one of the South's largest art collectors, knew Rockwell personally and happily lent his Rockwells for the Marietta/Cobb show. "The director of the High Museum pooh-poohed the show at the time," says Bentley. "We're having fun with that one. Now they're saying Rockwell is the modern Vermeer."

Anne Morgan, meanwhile, asked the Rockwell Museum if it would consider having a major retrospective at the High. But when she first approached Rifkin, then director of the High (he officially left on December 31), he blanched. Sure, corporate sponsors and the general public would love it, but was he willing to risk not only his reputation but the museum's as well by exhibiting the work of an artist who was generally considered a sentimental lightweight in the world of fine art?

Ultimately, Rifkin decided that, whatever his merits as a painter, Rockwell was nonetheless what he calls "a force" in American visual culture. "If the 20th century was the American century," says Rifkin, "why not look at the most American artist? I think the door needs to be opened for Norman Rockwell."

Morgan's argument that a Rockwell exhibition had the potential to be a blockbuster also helped to sway Rifkin. High officials now project that "Pictures for the American People" will equal or surpass the High's attendance record of 252,000 set by a show on Impressionism last year. "Ned is highly respected in the art world," she says, "so when he mustered the courage [to hold the exhibition], people took notice."

What the High Museum gave a Rockwell retrospective that the Marietta/Cobb Museum could not was respectability. The High has a $56 million endowment and 115 employees; the Marietta/Cobb has no endowment and only five employees. The involvement of the High also gave the Norman Rockwell Museum the resources to think big - its trustees had long been interested in mounting a touring exhibition of the artist's work. "We knew the Rockwell world," says Rockwell Museum curator Maureen Hart Hennessey. "They knew the world of organizing traveling exhibitions."

The High's show attracted big corporate sponsors such as Ford Motor Co., Fidelity Investments, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Georgia. But not all museums approached for the tour were as enthusiastic; indeed, several turned it down. David Ross, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (former head of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art), says that the show was not offered to his museum but that he would have considered it.

The Rockwell Museum wanted the Guggenheim to be part of the tour, but those phone calls initially went unreturned. So the itinerary was set: The show would end in Stockbridge. Then, Guggenheim curator Robert Rosenblum expressed enthusiasm forRockwell in a New York Times article. Guggenheim director Thomas Krens read it. Suddenly, the phone calls were returned. And that's how the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge scored its coup - and why the show is ending in New York.

The last big Rockwell exhibition was in 1972, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but "Pictures for the American People" is the most comprehensive exhibition of Rockwell's work ever assembled outside of Stockbridge.

The exhibition consists of some 70 major oil paintings, plus all 322 of Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers, some still bearing mailing labels. With an eye to establishing Rockwell as an artist as well as an illustrator, the show pointedly ignores most of Rockwell's advertising work.

Other than that, much is there: The Four Freedoms, a quartet of paintings Rockwell made in 1943 in response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union Address, has its own gallery, as it does in Stockbridge. Also represented are later, more political works, like The Problem We All Live With (1964), which depicts little Ruby Bridges being escorted into school by four US marshals during the integration of schools in New Orleans.

Among the sentimental favorites in the show are signature Rockwell scenes of youthful exuberance, mischief, and self-discovery. In fact, the billboard-sized poster on the facade of the museum is After the Prom, two teens sitting at a drugstore counter as a soda jerk sniffs the girl's corsage. The painting sold at auction in 1995 for $800,000. The market for Rockwell's paintings has always been strong. Sotheby's in New York has sold 20 Rockwells over the past three years for prices ranging from $90,000 to $937,500, and most major paintings fetch between $200,000 and $300,000.

But if Rockwell's paintings have both mass appeal and market value, they have not, until recently, had critical approval. "Pictures for the American People" may, however, signal a sea change in Rockwell's aesthetic reputation.

Not unexpectedly, the national tour and its attendant publicity have given new life to the old debate over Norman Rockwell, who was once characterized by New York Times art critic John Canaday as "the Rembrandt of Punkin' Crick." Now that his works will hang in the likes of the Guggenheim, does it change who he was or how he should be regarded? Was he an artist or an illustrator? Does his work belong on the walls of museums or on magazine covers? And does the national tour say more about Rockwell or more about the marketing of culture?

Rockwell has some pretty illustrious defenders. The catalog for "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People" (Harry N. Abrams, $35) musters an array of art-world notables in favor of a new look at the artist, among them former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving, the Guggenheim's Rosenblum, and art critic Dave Hickey.

It was Hickey, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who referred to Rockwell as "the Vermeer of this nation's domestic history." Hickey argues that Rockwell is a major artist because he "invented Democratic History Painting," painting the history of 20th-century America as seen through the lives of ordinary Americans.

"He's an important painter because he paints genre paintings as history paintings," says Hickey. "In his work, you see war, taxes, elections, writ small."

Rockwell was not always accorded such importance. The art world's prejudice against Rockwell dates from the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of abstraction. Modern art was supposed to be difficult, ironic, urban, abstract. Rockwell's art was easy-going, good-natured, sincere, small-town, realistic. As such, it was deemed inferior as fine art.

Rosenblum argues that the prejudice against Rockwell was a function of the struggle to gain recognition for Abstract Expressionism.

"Modern-art people in the 20th century were very evangelical. They had a whole new point of view that was alien to the world of Norman Rockwell," says Rosenblum. "Modernism was like a religion, a faith they fought for. The enemy was narrative painting, especially painting like Rockwell's, that didn't need a program to be understood. But there's no reason to maintain these old wars anymore. The modernist camp is pretty old-fashioned now."

As part of the exhibition's opening-week festivities, sculptor Peter Rockwell, one of Norman's three sons, gave a talk in Atlanta's Symphony Hall on his father's life and art. He believes that the critics misunderstood and misused his father.

"He was a bit befuddled by Abstract Expressionism, but he wasn't against it," says Rockwell. "Still, critics used my father as a club to beat down abstraction." In fact, Willem DeKooning, one of the most important Abstract Expressionists, admired Rockwell's painting. Pop Art star Andy Warhol even owned one.

It does not surprise art critic Hilton Kramer that Warhol liked Norman Rockwell's art or that the Guggenheim's Rosenblum is on the Rockwell bandwagon. Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, sees the renaissance as a sign that artistic standards have declined in American museums generally and at the Guggenheim, once known as New York's "temple of non-objective art," specifically.

"Bobby Rosenblum has been promoting the line that we have to give parity to kitsch, along with high art, for a long time," says Kramer. "Once you embrace Andy Warhol, everything is permitted. The difference between one form of kitsch and another is not too great."

Kramer defines kitsch as "debased popular culture," but when asked how this designation applies to Rockwell, he begs off, saying, "The whole subject of Rockwell has just become too tedious. So many people have just wimped out on the question."

The Rockwell Museum's Hart Hennessey says that prejudice against Rockwell is still very much alive in the art world.

"He's almost been criticized more by omission," she says. "He's generally not included in any art-history survey courses."

So the question remains: Are American art museums now taking Norman Rockwell seriously as an artist, or, in an era when the Guggenheim exhibits motorcyles and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts shows fashion photos by Herb Ritts, is the Rockwell phenomenon simply an example of museums pandering to public tastes in order to generate box office?

Neil Harris, professor of history at the University of Chicago, is one of the country's foremost cultural historians, specializing in the history of museums and libraries. Harris says, "Museums have always struggled with questions like this. I don't see it as a decline in standards. It doesn't mean that Norman Rockwell is to be hung along with [Thomas] Eakins or Winslow Homer. The Rockwell show explores what it means to be commercial art, art for hire, art on demand."

Harris wrote an essay for the "Pictures for the American People" catalog, but he is lukewarm on Rockwell. "I consider Rockwell a marvelous, very important illustrator," says Harris. "I do not consider him a great artist."

Barbara Haskell, curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, included a war bond poster of Rockwell's Freedom From Want last year in an exhibition on the American century, but she says Rockwell's work "has a lot working against it" to be taken seriously as art. For one thing, Rockwell's pictures were made for commercial reproduction as magazine covers, she says, not for exhibition. They are also often humorous and sentimental.

"Sentiment is an aspect of art that has never played well in the big league," says Haskell. "The jury is still out. People who talk about his art really haven't seen it."

Indeed, the most important thing about "Pictures for the American People" may be that the American people are finally getting to see Norman Rockwell's paintings, not just reproductions.

Haskell believes that the present moment provides "the best climate for Rockwell's work to be seen. The embrace of popular culture by artists and intellectuals is at a level never seen before," she says. "The boundaries between fine art and popular culture are coming down."

Arthur Danto, art critic for The Nation and a philosophy professor at Columbia University, says that museum directors may be willing to reconsider Rockwell because "we've moved into an era of pluralism that comes with a certain permissiveness. There is no a priori view of what a picture should look like, so there's no reason it shouldn't look like a Norman Rockwell."

Mary Whalen Leonard modeled in the 1950s for Rockwell's Girl With Black Eye, Girl at the Mirror, and A Day in the Life of a Girl. She believes the resurgence of interest in her old friend Norman is less a matter of shifts in the aesthetic wind than of baby boomer nostalgia.

"As we move into the next millennium, people reflect on what were the good times in America," says Leonard, who flew to Atlanta from her home in Phoenix for the Rockwell opening. "He captured very ordinary events in a person's life. You can see yourself in his pictures, and, if you can see yourself, a story begins and a lost part of you becomes alive again."

"The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be," reads the Rockwell credo, stenciled high on a wall at the High gallery.

Though he lived and worked in rural New England for most of his adult life, Norman Rockwell was born on New York's Upper West Side. His father worked in the office of a textile firm, and his mother was sickly. Rockwell grew up lonely and withdrawn, taking refuge from an unhappy home and city life in drawing. His talent emerged while he was quite young. Rockwell trained in New York as an illustrator at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students' League. He became the art director of Boy's Life while still a teenager and, at age 22, sold his first cover illustration, Boy With Baby Carriage, to the Saturday Evening Post.

The gallery at the High Museum devoted to the covers Rockwell painted for the Post makes director Ned Rifkin's point about Norman Rockwell being "a force" in American culture graphically and immediately. The 322 magazine covers Rockwell painted between 1916 and 1963 present a compelling visual ride from the First World War through Vietnam. The Saturday Evening Post's mission was to create a vision of what America could be, and Norman Rockwell became the chief propagandist for the American Dream.

While his paintings have been promoted by conservatives as expressing "family values," he was far more sophisticated aesthetically and a great deal more liberal politically than most of his fans ever realized. Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Latimer, however, never allowed Rockwell to depict black people as anything other than servants, so it was not until he left the Post in 1963 and went to work for Look magazine for 10 years that Rockwell took on the issues of the day - civil rights, the war on poverty, the United Nations, the Peace Corps, the moon landing. During the height of the Vietnam War, Rockwell declined a commission to paint a Marine Corps recruiting poster, explaining, "I don't think we're helping the Vietnamese people lead better lives, do you?"

But Rockwell's liberal stance notwithstanding, in 1977, President Gerald Ford presented Rockwell with the Presidential Medal of Freedom "for his vivid and affectionate portraits of our country."

Most of those portraits focus on little moments in the lives of ordinary Americans. He drew his inspiration from his friends and neighbors; first in New Rochelle, New York, then in Arlington, Vermont, where he moved in 1939, and finally in the picture-book Berkshire community of Stockbridge, where he settled in 1953.

Norman Rockwell, however, did not live a Rockwellian life.

A shy, pigeon-toed man, he was uncomfortable around people, and he suffered periodic bouts of depression. He was known to work seven days a week, including holidays. Rockwell always wanted to be known as a genuine artist, and the criticism of him as a commercial hack hurt him greatly. His first marriage ended in divorce, and his second wife suffered from depression and alcoholism. The move to Stockbridge was prompted by Rockwell's desire to be close to the Austen Riggs Center, the psychiatric hospital where the Rockwells' therapist, Erik Erikson, worked. Rockwell's wife died unexpectedly in 1959, and two years later, he married a retired schoolteacher, Mary "Molly" Punderson. It was she who encouraged Rockwell to go to Look magazine, where he would have opportunities to explore his more liberal politics through his art.

Norman Rockwell, crowd-pleaser and critic's whipping boy, died rich and famous in Stockbridge in 1978. Today, Stockbridge is a mecca for Rockwell lovers. For nearly 25 years, Rockwell's paintings were part of the Historical Society on Main Street. In 1993, the Norman Rockwell Museum moved to an elegant new building designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern on a 36-acre Stockbridge estate overlooking the Housatonic River. The building was paid for in part by Rockwell's chief collector, filmmaker Steven Spielberg; the museum now attracts close to 200,000 visitors a year. The Steven Spielberg/Time Warner Communications Building contains 570 Rockwell paintings and drawings as well as 100,000 photographs, letters, and other archival materials.

Until now, Norman Rockwell's work was seen primarily by people who already knew and loved it and who were willing to make the trek to the Berkshires. The primary goal of "Pictures for the American People" is to place Norman Rockwell's paintings before a new and more diverse audience. An informal survey the museum did during the first week of the exhibition confirmed that the show was drawing new visitors. Fifty percent of the folks in the gallery had never been to the High before; 27 percent had never been to any art museum.

But Atlanta's predominantly black population has so far not visited in great numbers. Only four of 100 museumgoers counted on the first day this reporter visited the show were black. Given that, it is surprising that the response of black Atlantans who have seen the show has been very favorable.

Alexis Scott, publisher of the Atlanta Daily World, the newspaper that has served Atlanta's black community since 1928, is a member of the High's board of trustees. Running The Problem We All Live With on the front page of her paper was a difficult decision, she says, "because the newspaper has a policy of not printing the N-word."

"When black people look at an image like that, having experienced segregation, their first thought is suspicion," says Scott. "What is he talking about? Are we the problem? Are they the problem? The real genius Rockwell had was that he captured the essence of the problem for black people and white people alike. He was able to connect with both sides."

Rockwell is also connecting with some of the next generation of artists. A few of them - pierced, tattooed, henna'd, corn-rowed, and dreadlocked - stood outside the Atlanta College of Art on Peachtree Street, talking about art and smoking cigarettes. Evrim Cakir, a 21-year-old photography student from Saddle River, New Jersey, whose face sparkled with glitter, said she likes Cindy Sherman, a photographer famous for photographing herself disguised in various personas. So what did this hip, young art student make of the big Norman Rockwell show next door? "It's awesome," said Cakir, volunteering that she grew up with a Rockwell reproduction in her home. "It's about time they started recognizing Norman Rockwell. I'm tired of all the art you have to examine. Norman Rockwell's work brings happiness. His world was the way he wanted it to be. So what if it's not about death, decay, and madness? It said, `Life can be beautiful.'