Art For The People Norman Rockwell and Sister Wendy By Elizabeth Licata Norman Rockwell, detail of The Connoisseur (1962). From Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People. Abrams: 1999 Judging by the current popularity of Sister Wendy, the PBS art critic, and Norman Rockwell, the famous illustrator, every picture does and should tell a story. These two figures are probably just as responsible for the resurgence of attendance at art museums across America as any Monet or Renoir blockbuster. Through her cute and quirky mini-lectures about famous paintings, Sister Wendy has popularized art history more than anyone could have thought possible. And Rockwell’s well-known images of soda jerks, grubby urchins, and small-town soap opera are about to make a splashy debut at no less a temple of high culture than New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Norman Rockwell was a brilliant illustrator and probably America’s best-loved artist. His paintings, first seen on the covers of magazines and as posters, seem almost synonymous with a certain definition of 20th century America, one largely focused on the poignant minutia of everyday life. Until now, however, Rockwell’s work has been largely ignored by the fine art establishment, left out of art history books, and given little or no hanging space in museums. All that has changed during the last year. A traveling exhibition of Rockwell’s paintings is making its way across the country, accompanied by an illustrated hard-cover catalogue packed with serious essays by intellectual heavyweights. Unlike previous Rockwell coffee table books, the text—written by critics like Thomas Hoving, Robert Rosenblum, Robert Coles, and David Hickey—is given just as much or more space than the pictures. Herbert Gehr, Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow, Life, April 11, 1949. From Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People. Abrams: 1999. Now that we’ve moved past the battle between abstract and representational art—fought bitterly from the 1930’s to the 60’s, and declared largely irrelevant from the 70’s through the 90’s—the fact that Rockwell is a representational painter doesn’t really harm his reputation. What has hurt him, at least so far, is the fact that the initial forum for his art was mass media—magazines, newspapers, posters—and that the quaint sentimentality of his work often seems silly and dated to contemporary eyes. All of a sudden, though, a lot of those eyes are focusing on Rockwell in a different way. “I had virtually by accident gone to see the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., and I was totally riveted,” said Guggenheim Museum curator and NYU professor Robert Rosenblum in a recent Artnet.com interview (11/99). “I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Why are people so snooty about him? This is fascinating painting.’ And I think I spent more time in front of each painting than I have ever spent looking at Picasso or Titian or anything like that. It kept me looking. And I began to think about it—that the time had come when he no longer was the enemy. His pictures no longer felt like a threat to the great history of modern art...I had a conversion.” (It has often been observed that the art experience has a strong spiritual component.) Norman Rockwell. From Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People. Abrams: 1999 In the catalogue for the exhibition, David Hickey compares Rockwell’s teenage couple sitting in front of a soda counter, After the Prom (1957), to such 18th century masterpieces as Fragonard’s The Swing (1767) and Jacques-Louis David’s Belasarious Receiving Adonis (1781). According to Hickey, all three paintings employ the same dynamic compositional balance, as well as use a figure within the painting who, like us, is observing the action. This surrogate inclusion of the viewer in the painting increases the drama of the action taking place. And there are many other, similar, comparisons made throughout the catalogue essays. Like Daumier’s and Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographs, Rockwell’s work was meant to be reproduced in large quantities, not isolated in art galleries. Like filmmaker Frank Capra, he focused on the individual and celebrated democracy. Like Mark Twain, he underestimated his most light-hearted works and overvalued his “serious” paintings. There’s more. Like Jack Kerouac, Rockwell joyfully portrayed the sprawling symphony of America. Like Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, he imbued his imagery with nostalgia for innocent times long past. But, like contemporary artist Leon Golub, he was also capable of painting eerie and somber scenes of social history. Oh, and both Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol were big fans of Rockwell’s paintings. Probably the most convincing reason to take Rockwell seriously is the simple evidence that his work has survived and thrived. Could anyone even name another Saturday Evening Post illustrator? Illustrators rarely stay very long in the public consciousness—Rockwell’s has been a household name for over 70 years. It’s the same test that all the artists litanized in art history books have successfully passed. For me, the Rockwell image I will never forget and which has never lost its power is The Problem We All Live With. Rockwell did it for Look magazine in 1964. It shows a young black girl on her way to school with U.S. Marshalls marching protectively both before and after her. It says so much. It says that Rockwell, far from isolating himself from the “real” America, was able to illustrate one of the most emotionally and sociopolitically charged issues of his day succinctly and forcefully. It says that racial integration is an issue filled with ironies and tragedies. He does not spare us—including the word “nigger” sprawled on the wall accompanied by a splattered tomato. When the illustration came out, it was attacked by readers on both sides of the issue, but its strength and accomplishment is unquestioned. It—and another, darker, illustration, Southern Justice (1965)—are all the more forceful because the issue they address is still largely unresolved in 21st century America. Norman Rockwell, detail, The Problem We All Live With (1964). From Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People. Abrams: 1999. Norman Rockwell’s paintings are richly detailed narratives. The more you study each one, the more the plot of the story becomes fleshed out. And that’s why they are so popular. We all love a story. But nobody, it seems, loves a story more than Sister Wendy Beckett, a nun and art historian who has taken the public television airwaves by storm over the last eight years. Sister Wendy “visits” famous paintings around the world, and, on camera, stands in front of them and tells us why they’re so great. She never pre-scripts her talks, choosing instead to give spontaneous commentaries. She has also written a series of books based on her TV series, the latest of which, My Favorite Things, was recently released by Harry N. Abrams. Although her books are bestsellers and her TV series has been one of the most popular art series ever produced (grabbing 25% of watchers in the U.K.), Sister Wendy maintains her vow of poverty and donates all proceeds to the Carmelite order, although she has moved in to a better trailer. In both her series, and in media interviews, she is utterly charming and self-deprecating, making remarks like, “I am a mini-mini-celebrity and I feel that ‘missionary’ is a big word which I am loath to claim for myself. But obviously the only reason why I sacrifice a most blissful life of solitude for periods is because I think this is something useful,” and—apropos her now notorious comments about various body parts in famous paintings— “God did not create ‘no go’ parts of the body.” Sister Wendy’s charm is limitless, unlike her critiques of famous artworks. There, she, much like Rockwell, sticks to the narrative, finding stories in most paintings and explaining them to the viewer. For example, for Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergere (1882), she speculates on the mood of the barmaid: “She is lovely herself, yet she is lonely. ...her pretty face has a faraway look,” and concludes, “her work is only serving drinks to rather tatty-looking older men, a depressing job.” There are plenty of things to say about this visually complex masterpiece, where Manet uses mirrors to practically hurl the entire contents of a large Parisian nightclub against the forefront of his picture, and most are irrelevant to the emotional well-being of the barmaid. Sister Wendy. From My Favorite Things. Abrams: 1999 In another, nearly entirely abstract work by Paul Klee, Sister Wendy’s questions seem even more bizarre: “Over on the left, is that a tree inside a glass conservatory, a fancy sort of greenhouse where plants can grow in perfect conditions?” Who knows? Who cares? The work is made up of softly colored, overlapping squares, rectangles, and triangles. It’s clear why Sister Wendy rarely discusses abstract works. Yet, she has endeared herself to thousands of T.V. viewers who might normally never interest themselves in fine art, and for that, she is to be congratulated. And some of her deliberately “artless” criticisms ring poignantly true, as when she says about Cezanne’s Le Lac d’Annecy (1896), “When I am asked who is my favorite painter, I always say it is Cézanne, and then I hope that the next question will not be to ask me for my reasons.” How many of us have dreaded to be asked for our reasons for loving anything? Perhaps Sister Wendy’s finest accomplishment has been simply to draw our attention to great works of art, and—through her often superfluous chatter—we’re able to react and find our own way of entering the painting. Perhaps, like Rockwell, she values the familar stories of human existence above all other concerns, aesthetic or otherwise. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top