Art: The Rembrandt of Punkin Crick

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A picture, not a painting. Rockwell's reputation was not made by museums and could not have been. He lived at a time when museum art tended to intimidate or bore the mass audience. His work addressed its vast public through reproduction. It was seen, not as painting, but as windows opening onto slices of life. Its minute verisimilitude—as well as the ham-actor exaggeration of every wink, scowl, smirk or pout on the faces of its characters—was designed to be transposed into a mass medium, to survive the passage into ink compressed but unharmed. Rockwell's best illustrations tend to have the depthless narrative clarity of a TV image, which is also the clarity of popular art. His design has a coarse, efficient impact on the eye, but what gripped his audience was his ravenous and unselective appetite for the surface of things. Every hair of every mutt got its share of picturesque completeness. So his work acquired the same kind of relationship (or lack of it) to modern art that scale modeling has to sculpture. Not one shape had any aesthetic interest, but the level of effort was as unstinting as the craftsmanship. Besides, the pictures were funny and corny. Nothing ironic, no bitterness, a mild poking of fun at human foibles, never subversive nuance or a flick of indignation. What you got was what you saw. Rockwell took pains to ensure an absolute authenticity of detail-costumes, furniture, every object just right for period and wear; and no other artist in America had his knack of making a chicken stand still to be painted. (You rocked it back and forth, he explained for a minute or two, and that hypnotized it for five minutes.)

Yet this patient observation served to describe a dreamworld of small-town America. His paintings are not so much representations of reality as commercials for it. What they offer is Arcadia. In Rockwell's America, old people were no thrust like palsied, incontinent vegetables into nursing homes by their indifferent offspring; they stayed basking in respect on the porch, apple-cheeked and immorally spry. Kids did not snort angel dust and get one another pregnant; they stole apples and swam in forbidden water holes, but said grace before meals. All soldiers were nice kids from next door; all politicians were benevolent or harmlessly jumbling (though Rockwell, faced with the task of committing Spiro Agnew to canvas for the cover of TV Guide, once alowed that the discredited Veep was not quite his type); the great fact of society was the continuity of the family, generation on generation. It was a world unmarked by doubt, violence and greed. The mountainous Thanksgiving turkey that appears in Freedom from Want, 1943, is an image of virtuous abundance rather than extravagance, a puritan tone confirmed by the glasses of plain water on the table.