Art: The Rembrandt of Punkin Crick

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Propagated through 317 Saturday Evening Post covers and countless other illustrations, this consoling fiction made Rockwell seem a reticent monument of Americanism. In 1976, more than 10,000 spectators and 2,000 participants turned out for a Rockwell parade during the Bicentennial in Stockbridge, where he lived with his third wife Molly Punderson; for an hour and a half, float after float passed by, each bearing tableaux representing his most popular illustrations—the Four Freedoms, the Boy Scouts, the doctor solemnly examining a girl's broken doll, the returning G.I. Corny, certainly; but no American artist had ever received such an affecting tribute. By then Rockwell had outlived his subject matter, a fact that his fundamental decency did not permit him to ignore. "I really believed," he said six years earlier, "that the war against Hitler would bring the Four Freedoms to everyone. But I couldn't paint that today. I just don't believe it. I was doing this best-possible-world, Santa-down-the-chimney, lovely-kids-adoring-their-kindly-grandpa sort of thing. And I liked it, but now I'm sick of it." In the '60s, glimpses of a less Arcadian society surfaced in his work—most memorably, an illustration of U.S. marshals escorting a small black girl to school in Little Rock, Ark. But these did not represent the essential Rockwell as far as his public was concerned. What they wanted was a friendly world, shielded from the calamities of history and the endemic doubts that are the modernist heritage, set down in detail, painted as an honest grocer weighs ham, slice by slice, nothing skimped; and Norman Rockwell gave it to them for 60 years. He never made an impression on the history of art, and never will. But on the history of illustration and mass communication his mark was deep, and will remain indelible.

Robert Hughes