Art: The Innocent Abroad

When it comes to Norman Rockwell, we all know what we're supposed to think. Rockwell is to modern art what Robert Mapplethorpe is to family values--a slap in the face to all serious standards. So much the worse that for decades he was the best-loved American artist, at least until he was usurped by an even shrewder judge of the national disposition, Andy Warhol. To the art world Rockwell was an exasperating holdout, the man who didn't care that in the 20th century it was simply uncalled for to paint sweet-tempered vignettes in a representational style at something like a molecular level of detail.

So maybe it's a watershed in cultural attitudes that over the next two years the Rockwell retrospective now at Atlanta's High Museum of Art will be making a national victory lap. It's not just that it passes through Chicago, Washington, San Diego and Phoenix, Ariz., then touches down at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.--the place where his work is usually confined, to contain any risk of aesthetic infection. It's that the tour ends in triumph at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, an institution founded as a stronghold of "nonobjective art." If Rockwell can enter the Guggenheim, look soon for Mapplethorpe at the Vatican.

Maybe it's not such a surprise. The standard version of modern art history--the story that moves through the Impressionists and Cezanne to Cubism, and from there through ever greater reaches of stylization, psychic turmoil and abstraction--has been under pressure for years to admit developments that can't be legitimized under that model. The creamy maidens of Victorian genre painting, "outsider art" by the mentally ill, hard-to-categorize painters like Jacob Lawrence and Florine Stettheimer--all of them have been tried out on museum walls. It was only a matter of time before attention turned back to Rockwell, a man who could paint cute but intricate scenes like The Runaway, where a cop and a waiter at a lunch counter size up a wayward but innocent kid. Is this art rising from the primordial muck of kitsch? Or just kitsch? As the grownups look him over, the kid makes you think of Rockwell being examined by the powers that be. Including us.

Among critics and curators, the Rockwell show is now an occasion to announce themselves as Rockwell converts or as closet fans all along. Anytime the higher echelons of the culture industry set out to show how they're in touch with ordinary folks, they risk sounding like George Will when he writes about baseball. But this exhibit is an indicator of a real impulse in the art world lately to find vitality wherever it's to be found, now that the energies that moved modernism have long ago run aground. Perhaps for the first time in history, it's truly possible to ask an essential question: Can you take seriously an artist who illustrated 50 years of the Boy Scout calendar?