Not too long ago, I belonged to an online group, to which I no longer belong. Someone posted a collection of Norman Rockwell’s still famous (I guess) Saturday Evening Post covers and, as I glanced through them, I grew a little irritated by the relentless parade of happy, fifties, middle-class WASPs. I actually grew up as a happy, fifties, middle-class WASP, but even in real time I disliked Rockwell’s cloying sentimentality and relentless manipulation (no one, I think it’s safe to say, failed to get the “point” of a Rockwell illustration). But, more than that, I knew that not all of Rockwell’s work was shameless “happy” kitsch, causing me to post the above illustration to make my point.
My post prompted a great deal of comment, the large majority of it highly approving, but unfortunately in my “set-up” I remarked that most of Rockwell’s illustrations showed a “white” America. Well, apparently you aren’t supposed to say such things on the web, for fear of offending various alt-right snowflakes who want to believe that all this “racism” stuff is just left-wing lies. I didn’t bother reading the negative comments, because who likes negativism? But the organizer of the group apparently didn’t like all the fuss, so my post was taken down, and I exited the group in sour and silent protest.
All of which detracts from Rockwell’s painting, which I think is quite remarkable and quite unlike the great majority of his work. It’s true that the “snap” of of the U.S. marshall’s postures–they’re all in step and their half-clenched fists are perfectly choreographed as well–is too much, but not that too much. It distracts very little from the central image of the beautiful little black girl, carrying America’s honor, to the extent that it exists, in her own delicate, unfrightened person. The ignorant hatred of the unseen racists is depicted by the stained concrete wall, most memorably by what was probably Rockwell’s gutsiest gesture as an artist, the word “NIGGER” scawled in letters large enough to be unescapable yet not dark enough to dominate the image.
It is striking to study how much effort Rockwell put into the wall itself, the bare, unadorned, ugly, stained concrete that serves as a canvas for the racist apes opposing integration to paint their own unwitting self-portrait. Rockwell’s photographic realism, so often placed in the service of a shameless commercialism, here is so bold as to actually depict “the truth”.
This painting made a particular impact on me because I had never seen it until about twenty years ago, though it was painted in the early sixties. I was so used to thinking of Rockwell as an utter fraud that I had a hard time believing that it was his, although his “style”, even to my ignorant eyes, is unmistakable. My idea of Rockwell had been formed back in the fifties. I had several friends whose parents subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, now forgotten but once one of the most prominent magazines in America. As the fifties ended my friends moved away and I never saw the “new” Norman Rockwell.
Afterwords
Rockwell’s painting commemorates the integration of the New Orleans school system in 1960 by Ruby Bridges.
