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    American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
    American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
    American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
    Audiobook19 hours

    American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

    Written by Deborah Solomon

    Narrated by Andrea Gallo

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white school-- here was an America whose citizens seemed to believe in equality and gladness for all. Who was this man who served as our unofficial " artist in chief" and bolstered our country' s national identity? Behind the folksy, pipe-smoking facade lay a surprisingly complex figure-- a lonely painter who suffered from depression and was consumed by a sense of inadequacy. He wound up in treatment with the celebrated psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. In fact, Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts so that he and his wife could be near Austen Riggs, a leading psychiatric hospital. " What' s interesting is how Rockwell' s personal desire for inclusion and normalcy spoke to the national desire for inclusion and normalcy," writes Solomon. " His work mirrors his own temperament-- his sense of humor, his fear of depths-- and struck Americans as a truer version of themselves than the sallow, solemn, hard-bitten Puritans they knew from eighteenth-century portraits." Deborah Solomon, a biographer and art critic, draws on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents to explore the relationship between Rockwell' s despairing personality and his genius for reflecting America' s brightest hopes. " The thrill of his work," she writes, " is that he was able to use a commercial form [that of magazine illustration] to thrash out his private obsessions." In American Mirror, Solomon trains her perceptive eye not only on Rockwell and his art but on the development of visual journalism as it evolved from illustration in the 1920s to photography in the 1930s to television in the 1950s. She offers vivid cameos of the many famous Americans whom Rockwell counted as friends, including President Dwight Eisenhower, the folk artist Grandma Moses, the rock musician Al Kooper, and the generation of now-forgotten painters who ushered in the Golden Age of illustration, especially J. C. Leyendecker, the reclusive legend who created the Arrow Collar Man. Although derided by critics in his lifetime as a mere illustrator whose work could not compete with that of the Abstract Expressionists and other modern art movements, Rockwell has since attracted a passionate following in the art world. His faith in the power of storytelling puts his work in sync with the current art scene. American Mirror brilliantly explains why he deserves to be remembered as an American master of the first rank.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateDec 20, 2013
    ISBN9781470392178

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    Reviews for American Mirror

    4/5

    27 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I guess I’m not enough of an art snob to have felt Rockwell wasn’t an artist but merely an illustrator. The major critics of the time belittled his work but I always loved his work and considered it to be a unique and detailed depiction of American life in the 20th century. Deborah Solomon goes through his life with a fine tooth comb and as she passes from one phase to the next she describes his life as it year by year through the art he produced at that time. I knew little to nothing about his personal life. Married three times, Rockwell was an indifferent family man who would rather be in his art studio than anywhere else. He considered himself an illustrator not an artist. When people criticized his work as not really “art” he mostly agreed. He spent years in therapy because he was a terrifyingly shy and insecure man. He traveled the world but was always happiest when he got back to his final home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His legacy is on display there at a museum set up by his last wife and frequented by tens of thousands every year. This was an excellent biography that I am very happy to have read and I can heartily recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Norman Rockwell always referred to himself as an illustrator, not an artist. He wanted to be an artist, but he didn't think he was good enough. For most of his long career, the art world felt the same way. He lived at a time when Jackson Pollock and other abstract artists dominated the scene. Rockwell, besides being considered old-fashioned, was too popular and simply made too much money to be taken seriously by the art elite.Yet Deborah Solomon's excellent 2014 Rockwell biography has a telling title: "American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell." To this professional art critic, also a biographer of Pollock, he was indeed an artist, and her book gives him his due as such.The change in how Rockwell was viewed began late in his life, encouraged by, of all things, the Pop art movement of Andy Warhol and others. If a realistic painting of a soup can can be seen as a work of art, then surely Rockwell's brand of realism qualifies as well. And Rockwell, as Solomon points out, was a much better painter than Warhol. She writes, "Warhol used the techniques of commercial art to make high art, whereas Rockwell used the techniques of high art to make commercial art."Solomon critiques each of Rockwell's major paintings, telling us how it came to be, who posed for it and how it stands up as a work of art. She does this without downplaying the main objective of a biographer's job, telling a life story. For someone who spent most of his time in his studio painting pictures, Rockwell led an interesting life. He had three wives, met many famous people and traveled a great deal. While his paintings were often considered, rightly or wrongly, a reflection of America's past, some of them, especially his painting of Ruby Bridges, the little black girl in the white dress being escorted to school by federal marshals, helped shape its future. He was, for someone so quiet and unassuming, very influential.Where Solomon fails her subject is in her attempts to psychoanalyze him, trying to read things into his life and into his paintings that may or may not be there. She says repeatedly that "there is no evidence to suggest that he behaved in a way that was inappropriate" toward the boys who posed for him, yet that doesn't stop her from suggesting that he, at the very least, had inappropriate thoughts. She finds something sexually suggestive about the painting "The Runaway" showing, from behind, a cop and a runaway boy sitting on restaurant stools. Rockwell did paint many pictures of boys, in part because of his Boy Scout calendars, but he also painted many girls, as well as men and women. If he didn't paint sexy women, perhaps his own explanation, that he simply couldn't do it very well, was the truth. Solomon's most ridiculous comment may be when she says Rockwell "squeezed his feet into tight shoes, as if trying to keep the dirtier parts of himself constrained." Or maybe he was vain about big feet or simply preferred tight shoes.Solomon insists the busy artist devoted too little time to his wives, but she says his second wife, Mary, twice read "War and Peace" aloud to him. How much time would that have taken?The man had plenty of faults and plenty of insecurities and compulsions, but his biographer does him a disservice by finding shortcomings that may only be in her imagination.
    • 4/5
      Wow, great historical events and personal details through and through. Leaves you with some questions that you ask yourself from time to time when you see a rockwell painting. The back story in each piece of his art that was featured is just wonderfully human.
    • 5/5
      A rare biography that is balanced in its treatment of the profiled person. It has high praise for Rockwell's work and good qualities but also shows the downside. He was indifferent as a husband and parent and suffered from multiple neuroses including his obsessiveness. He was in therapy for years with little measure of success to show for it. Also includes many color and black and white inserts that illustrate Rockwell's work at Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere.