Art: The Rembrandt of Punkin Crick

Norman Normal, such was his image: the Rembrandt of Punkin Crick, as one critic rather sourly called him, the folksy poet of a way of American life that slipped away as he set it down. "I do ordinary people in everyday situations," Norman Rockwell once declared, "and that's about all I can do." From the day in 1916 when he walked apprehensively into the offices of the Saturday Evening Post—already a magazine circulating 2 million copies a week—carrying a velvet-wrapped bundle of paintings and sketches to show to Editor George Lorimer, Rockwell was greeted by nothing but success. He began his career as a professional artist at a time when large-scale magazine color illustration, thanks to radically improved printing technology, had become one of the keys to mass culture—the television, one might say, of pre-electronic America. It was the illustrators' moment; born into it, Rockwell kept climbing. By 1920 he was the Post's star draftsman. By 1925 he had become a national name, and by the end of the Depression he was an American institution: it is unprovable, but probable, that Rockwell's images did more to bolster the assaulted values of American bourgeois life after the Crash than all the politicians' speeches lumped together.

When he died last week at 84 in his home in Stockbridge, Mass., Norman Rockwell shared with Walt Disney the extraordinary distinction of being one of the two artists familiar to nearly everyone in the U.S., rich or poor, black or white, museumgoer or not, illiterate or Ph.D. To a tiny minority of these people, Rockwell was a kitsch factory, turning out relentlessly sentimental icons of mid-cult virtue—family, kids, dogs and chickens, apple pie, Main Street and the flag—in the corniest of retardataire styles. But to most of them, Rockwell was a master: sane (unlike Van Gogh), comprehensible (unlike Picasso), modest (unlike Dali), and perfectly attuned to what they wanted in a picture.