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Accompanying the first major traveling exhibition of works by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), this volume presents a complete reappraisal of one of America's most beloved artists. Contributors from a wide range of fields--including leading art historians, cultural critics, a renowned child psychiatrists, and a leading graphic designer--shed new light on the complexity of Rockwell's art and his place as a shaper of mass-media imagery.
Stunning colorplates reproduce Rockwell's paintings in crisp detail, and the essays set them in fresh contexts, discussing such themes as Rockwell's urban scenes; the reaction by both black and white Southerners to Rockwell's historic civil rights painting THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH; AND Rockwell's role in the development of American illustration. Above all, this important volume examines Norman Rockwell's critical place in 20th-century American culture.

"The catalogue succeeds best in its treatment of Rockwell as an artist worthy of investigation. The 15 contributors' backgrounds range from art history to child psychiatry, making for an unusually broad range of vision. Mixed in with the obligatory but good biographical essays is a hymn to democracy from Dave Hickey, a why-I-still-hate-Rockwell therapy session from Neil Harris, and relentless revisionism from Karal Ann Marling (who, incidentally, reads Rockwell's 1927 Santa Claus as a potential child eater). Weaving the essays into a coherent whole is a thread of personal anecdote, perhaps appropriate to this small-town painter of the anecdotal. The two gems of the catalogue are Wanda M. Corn's discussion of THE CONNOISSEUR from 1962 and Robert Coles's essay on THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH from 1964."

Jennifer A. Greenhill, Boston Book Review, April 2000

Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People: Search Results