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?

The answer, of course, is, How can you not take him seriously? Even when you see every one of his 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post spread out across one gallery of the show--and notice that more than a few of them really are a little precious--you have to admit to Rockwell's ingenuity. What the original canvases for those covers make plain is that he was a painter of great if anachronistic gifts. He carried into the 20th century the ancient pleasures of visual storytelling and fine-grained description. These happen to be the same enjoyments that art has largely turned over to photography, movies and television, none of which can offer back the visual world with anything like the mouth-watering delights of paint.

Rockwell could. He knew how a few brushstrokes can mimic wet hair, effulgent sunlight, gunmetal, crinoline, catsup, cardboard, painted brick and polished linoleum. And he got those effects without losing sight of the muddy pleasure of pigment itself, a fundamental notion of modern painting. In a few inches of sailcloth or the slip worn by his Girl at Mirror, he could put white paint through as many adventures as Robert Ryman does in his snow-flurry abstractions. As for his pieties, they turn out sometimes to be the same ones fundamental to civil society. By nothing less than an actual vote among Post readers, Saying Grace was his most popular canvas. In a flyblown city restaurant, a boy and his grandmother bow their heads to pray while everybody else looks on. If the picture is about the secular world making space for the spiritual, which it plainly is, it's also about the larger notion of every tribe in American society making space for every other.

Too bad Rockwell's democratic spirit can't blind you to the fact that so many of his pictures really are the insipid jokes and consoling fictions they were always said to be. The fact that sentimentality in painting has a pedigree reaching back to Rubens doesn't make Rockwell's puppy dogs any more digestible now. There are parts of this show that could make you hate Santa Claus.

Until World War II, the larger commotions of the century don't get into Rockwell's work at all. Looking at his output from the 1930s, you would never know there was a Depression. When the century exploded, he cushioned the blows. He once said, "This is where I can find America the way I want it."