Norman Rockwell's photos

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In the past we've seen how pinup painters used photographs to compose their works. More traditional painters, like Norman Rockwell in these examples, employed the same technoque (source La boite verte).

The empty heart of political correctness

Wishes in the Wind by David Lenz

The above painting is Wishes in the Wind by David Lenz. Until earlier in the year it hung in the Wisconsin Governor's mansion. Governor Walker replaced it and, Wisconsin being Wisconsin, this touched off a controversy. There were charges bandied about that he was being racist for taking the painting down. You can read about it in the Journal Sentinel article Artwork shuffle at governor's mansion raises eyebrows if you're in the mood for some tedium. 

I'm not so much interested in the politics of artwork displays in Wisconsin, but I would like to talk about the painting.

It is done in the style of hyperrealism. It is obviously technically very proficient. When I first read the Journal Sentinel article it took me some time to realize that it was a painting and not a photograph. When I did finally realize it was a painting I spent time marveling over just how well he captured the look of snow and dirty slush. 

Therein lies the problem with the painting -- if one spends more time admiring the technique of painting slush in a gutter than in contemplating the three kids at its core, then perhaps the core of the painting lacks heft?  

The children at the core are simply a PC cliche. The careful gender and ethnic mix and the child-like purity in their wonderment over soap bubbles is exactly the sort of image that dominates advertising in these PC obsessed days. Look through any collection of stock photography and you'll see the same mix of diversity and smiles. The picture evokes nothing. It is, technical considerations aside, banal.

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Contrast that painting with Norman Rockwell's illustration of childhood and race. On moving day the two groups of siblings approach each other tentatively. Their shared commonality -- the boy's baseball gloves, the girl's pets, and the shyness of them all -- implies that left to their own devices they will become fast friends.

However, an adult viewer of the illustration will know just how much resentment there will be towards the black family in the suburban neighborhood. Balanced against the children's ability to ignore race at their young age, is the fact that adults will likely poison the well with their prejudices. 

It is the power of Rockwell's illustration -- the simple question to the viewer, will you come between these children or will you do the right thing?

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 If you think Rockwell was too maudlin ever to mean to send such a message, consider his illustration above. It drips with adult menace and racial passion. The four marshals guarding the little girl on the way to school, the splatter from the thrown tomato, the word "nigger" scrawled on the wall. It paints racism as an unmistakably ugly, irrational and violent force. It is a powerful statement made in the days before the bindings of political correctness, by an illustrator many consider a sentimental old fraud.    

I suspect Lenz's Wishes in the Wind was selected by a committee. I suspect that at least once in their meetings the following was said, "we need something to represent the diversity of our State." That's what they got -- a bit of diversified fluff with nicely rendered slush. Paint on canvas can do so much more if you're willing to look at the world instead of slogans.
 

For this, the Founders risked powder and ball?

There is a Washington Post Review, Norman Rockwell exhibit opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, by Blake Gopnik that's making the blog rounds and receiving much well deserved mockery in the process. 

I'm not a huge fan of Rockwell, I think he is rather schmaltzy, but it is clear he is an excellent and influential illustrator.

Glopnik on the other hand goes well around the bend in his disdain for Rockwell. He uses the 4th of July as an excuse to opine on the courage of American artists: Emily Dickinson for experimenting with her poetry, Louis Armstrong for playing jazz, and finally Jackson Pollack for splattering paint on canvas.

You can probably imagine what somebody who is a big enough twit to spin panegyrics about the heroism of Pollack's painting style thinks of Norman Rockwell. To put it mildly, he comes across as an insufferable snob.

What captured my eye in his piece, particularily in light of my last post Lopsided Democracy, was the following:

Rockwell's vision of "Freedom of Speech," included in the Smithsonian's show, doesn't invoke a communist printing his pamphlets or an atheist on a soapbox. It gives us a town hall meeting of almost interchangeable New Englanders, no doubt agreeing to disagree about something as divisive as the rates for those new parking meters. For this, the Founders risked powder and ball? 

First off, to answer Glopnik's question, yes, that is why the Founders risked powder and ball. The picture shows a common working man standing to speak at a meeting. On either side he is flanked by men, who are dressed in suits and looking up and seriously listening to what he has to say. That is about as simple an image as one could paint of Jefferson's subversive and revolutionary notion that "all men are created equal".

That dignity, afforded to all men to both speak and to order their own affairs --the affairs of the nation as well as the town hall town meetings that Glopnik so cavalierly dismisses -- is precisely why they fought the Revolution. The idea that no man is above another in either station, caste or dignity is the axiom from which all else American flows.

By the way Mr. Glopnik, all the archetypes on your list that you get misty-eyed over: communists printing pamphlets, atheists on soapboxes, Latino socialists, disgruntled lesbian spinsters, foul-mouthed Jewish comics and metrosexual half-Canadian art critics are free to speak their mind in this country which you seem to think is full of vapid bumpkins.

Perhaps you should scrub the cliches from your writing, and your list was certainly a string of cliches if I ever saw one, before you presume to tell other people what a shallow, maudlin fools they are for liking an illustration.