The Innocent Abroad

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As it turned out, in his own politics Rockwell was a liberal, which could be guessed from the understated plea for tolerance that so many of his pictures make. In the 1960s, when he left the Post for Look magazine, he turned to producing plainer public statements like The Problem We All Live With, a bare rectangle in which a black girl is chaperoned by federal Marshals as she tries to integrate a Southern school. Public rhetoric was never Rockwell's strength. But he brings such a hard-lit, neoclassical calm to this moment that the remnants of a tomato smashed against the wall behind her are more shocking than a pool of blood.

By the time he died, in 1978, Rockwell occupied a place somewhere between Vermeer and Disney, a hard spot to locate, much less evaluate. But whatever else he was, Rockwell was the road not traveled. You go through this show wondering what 20th century art might have been like if it had not been so quick to put aside anecdote, draftsmanship and the raptures of watching paint do its dead-on imitations of other stuff. In short, what it might have been like if it valued more what Rockwell did. Given the essential places where painting had to go, places where Rockwell couldn't follow, maybe art had to put those things aside. But his best pictures remind you of the powers it gave up as a consequence. It may be true that Rockwell did nothing to advance art history. But what he did, in his humble way, was humble it.