November 30, 2006
Norman Rockwell and the Explosion of Wealth II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST I share John Steele Gordon’s amazement at the story behind Norman Rockwell’s famous painting Breaking Home Ties. A year or so ago my wife and I took a trip to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a dose of autumnal leaf-peeping and small-town Americana nostalgia. Stockbridge is picture-perfect on both counts. Rockwell’s famous December 1967 cover for McCall’s magazine, entitled “Stockbridge at Christmas,” shows the town’s main street covered in a thin blanket of snow, set against the majestic backdrop of the Berkshire mountains. Rockwell lived in Stockbridge for many years, and a museum showcasing the largest collection of his art (as well as his old studio) still rests on the outskirts of town. We had a good laugh this morning when we realized that the painting we saw at the museum that we thought was Breaking Home Ties was an impostor.
As Mr. Gordon notes, Rockwell isn’t a favorite among art critics. Until recently he also offended the sensibilities of many cultural critics and scholars who resented his celebration of small-town America, which struck them as stodgy and conservative. Having grown up in a small town—Bordentown, New Jersey, founded in 1682, population 3,800, the sort of place where the old brick sidewalks buckle from the force of ancient tree roots—I viscerally understand what Rockwell was getting at. Such places are fewer in number than they once were, but they existed, and they were quite authentic. Just visit Stockbridge in December. It looks exactly as it did when Rockwell immortalized it. He wasn’t making it up, because he didn’t have to.
More to the point, critics have missed a subtle strain of social commentary in Rockwell’s art. It’s not just classic political works like The Problem We All Live With and New Kids in the Neighborhood, which tackled head-on (and with clear liberal sympathies) the issue of school and neighborhood desegregation, or the “Four Freedoms” series, which Rockwell designed for a war bonds drive, and which placed in visual perspective Franklin Roosevelt’s decidedly liberal vision of a postwar world free from material want and prejudice. This social commentary is also evident in works such as Breaking Home Ties, which shows the disconnect between a blue-collar man and his college-bound son. If the small-town world that Rockwell chronicled was overwhelmingly white, nevertheless it had undercurrents of class tension, and Rockwell captured these undercurrents with humor and sympathy.
Mr. Gordon is probably right about the causes of price inflation in the art market. More millionaires, fewer available works by the acknowledged masters. Normally I’m a little more critical of the invisible hand than Mr. Gordon, but in this case, I’d readily agree that the consumers of art have made a wise choice in their veneration of Norman Rockwell. Inherent in this choice is a wisdom that many critics have not yet caught onto.
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