ISSUES & COMMENTARY The Rockwell Syndrome Long di'sparaged by cri,ti,cs, I{orman Eockwell i,s now ttte subject of a major traueli,ng retrospecti,ue- and af the author's speculati,ons on the arti,st-i,llustrator's d,i,ui,d,ed, persona, BY DANIEL BELGRAD [lerhaps no orher American aflist except Fnr,, ulsne) nas oeen as loveo as Norman Rockwell. When Christopher Finch's volrme Norman Rockwell's America was published in 1976, complete with 659 illustra- tions, the general press reviews celebrated Rockwell as "justifiably one of the nation's ali- time favorites" (Washington Star News),"the grand old man of American art" (Good Housekeepi,ng) and "the true portraitist of the spirit of America in the 20th Century" (Portland 0regonian). Like Disnev's, Rockweil's art is embraced by many people who do not think ofthemsehes in generai as art lovers. And yet Rockwell has ceftainly attracted a lot of negative criticism from professional aft critics. Theodore F. Wolff, for example, wrote in 1989: There can be no doubt ihat Rockwell's production was unevenr that most of it was tdvial, even, at times, emba.rrassin$y haclmeyed. He had a dfficult time avoiding the obvious and overly sentimental: little boys were hvariably fieckled and gauty, had big ears, and loved baseball little old ladies were kindly and loved nothing so much as to give cookies to children and to beam at evidence of young love. And everyone was God-fearing, patriotic, hardwork- ing, and respectful of motherhood, apple pie, and ihe sanctity of marriage.r Two themes recur in such criticism. One is social: Rockrvell is accused of working with outmoded and restrictive stereotlpes that offer us only very limited ways of engaging our complex social reality. The darker side ofthis reality-issues like divorce and loneliness, poverf, and environmental degadation-RocLrvell simply ignores. The second theme is esthetic. Rockwell's a.rt is said to be neither subtle nor psychologically deep; Wolff uses the tems "trivial," "haclmeyed," "obvious" and "overly sentimental." Those who defend Rockrrell, on the other hand, defend him along wtiolly djfferent lines. They point out that he is a national favorite, a painter ofthe everyday American dream, a creator of art worla accessible to the cornmon man. My purpose is not to take sides in this debate, but to sideline it, by explaining how Rockrrell's art works, and wfty it works in its given social context. Born in 1894 and dying in 1978, Rockwell lived through 84 years of great cultural change in America. During his lifetime, the horse and buggy were replaced by the automobile and the airplane; the piano in the parlor by the telephone, the radio and the TV; the milkman on his rounds by the mod- ern supermarket. It is perhaps obvious that the popularity of Rockwell's aft rests in its purposeful evocation and resolution of the feelings created by that shift. The change spread especially quickly in the affluent 1920s and in the era of resurgent pros- I ila Slltordlrr. f,r {,ning Our Gamhle wlt=t_P:stiny l/VAfll'llNff T0 Y0lil'lG M${ ,,r*,*u,,,0 9 , ^i";. n -, ruf ;"". + ]li\ l{;. t1}5!) /.i. perity during and after the Second World War, when the lingering specter of the Great Depression was banished once and for all. Focusing on Rockwell's work in these periods, then, should provide a sense of the psychological dlnamics that make it-well- work. I n 1979. the French sociologist Pienr Bourdieu pub- I lished the rcsults of a 20-year srudy that empiricalJy measured what cultural theorists had long suggested: namely, that particular tastes ale not isolated but can be linked, with considerable accuracy, to other tastes and, indeed, to clusters of esthetic values that cone- spond to one's place in the social system. For instance, Bourdieu's data established that French people who liked abstract painting also tended to prefer \4valdi's Four Seasons to Strauss's Blae Danube, and were more likely to be secondary school teachers or engi- neers than businessmen or industrialists.z More recent stuCies have substantiated the same phenomenon in American culture, although in different terms: for instance, anthropologists mapping musical taste to social status found a group that they called the "Neil Diamond nurses." These sorts of studies confirm the analysis of the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, r'lio in the years before World War II described the role of cu-lture in society as the creation of "hegemo- ny": that is, as the maintenance of cohesion in a diverse and inherently unequal society. According to Gramsci's theory, the hegemonic culture offers an overlapping range ofvalues that bind most people together; even if no one agrces completely with all aspects of the domi- nant culhue, few a,re so far outside the system as to dissent violently from it, and so social order is maintained. Gramsci described the hegemonic culture as the active interlocking of distinct identif groups defined by characteris- tic interests, values and tastes-hence the clusters that Bourdieu identified. British critic Ral'mond Williams named these identif goups "cultural fomations." Such cultural fomations have spokespersons, whom Gramsci called "organic intellectuals." Though not necessarily intellectuals in the conventional sense of the term, they articulate and propagate the va,lues of their cultural fomation, thus shaping the broader culture. This is how I believe we can understand Norman Rockrryell-as an organic intellectual representing a culturai fomation that in mid 20th-century America was lmolyn as the "middlebrow."s The struggle for cultural authority between the middlebrows and the "highbrows" was intimately linked to the social transforma- tions that distinguished Rockwell's lifetime, for it originated in the blth of mass culture, made possible by the new technologies of cul- tural production and distribution. It continues today. But the contest was most furious during the period following the Great Depression. The conflicting values represented by the highbrow and middlebrow camps parallel the iines along which we have already heard Rockwell being criticized and praised-with the high- brows championing subtlety, and the middlebrows, accessibility. Each group represented their particular canon of taste as the necessary basis ofAmerican democracy. What was the highbrodmiddlebrow debate? The general affluence of the postwar period obscured class divisions by creating a "mass middle class" of blue-collar and white-collar suburbanites. But the mass-culture technologies that accompanied this boom (including radio, glossy magazines, television and Hollyrood movies) led to a reconflguration of social tensions on cultural terms. The social distinctions that had once been associated with economic status were translated, in the 1940s and '50s, into cultural posi- tions, as an elite defended its "higher" tastes, whether modern or genteel, against the onslaught of the new mass culhne. As Russell Lynes wrote n Haryter's mag- azine in 1949: Art i,n Ameri,ca 6l