"Norman Rockwell’s America" at Dulwich Picture Gallery. By Andrew Graham-Dixon.
"Grandfathers, puppy dogs, stuff like that" was Norman Rockwell’s self-deprecating encapsulation of his own work. Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition of the artist’s formidably polished brand of commercial illustration suggests the truth was a little more complicated. While Rockwell’s pictures can often be sweeter than apple pie, there is a solid centre to them and they speak cumulatively of a more than merely sentimental conception of the world.
For over fifty years Rockwell idealised America with single-minded determination, above all in the form of the covers that he designed and painted for the once famous Saturday Evening Post. He created more than 300 of these images, all of which have been arranged – the shifting mosaic of his dream of a nation – along one long wall of this exhibition. Rockwell himself said that his aim in those pictures was "to tell a whole story with a single image", but his cumulative achievement was something much more than the sum of its parts: a generously compendious, composite portrait of America as the land of the free and home of the brave. Raw-boned boys, raised on milk and cookies, baseball and football, get into all kinds of healthy scrapes. Picturesquely dishevelled farmers spend their Sunday afternoons fishing. A granite-jawed soldier, just returned from the First World War, is feted by the young boys of the neighbourhood, who have formed their own little militia – with tinpot helmets, wooden swords and jamlids for medals – to celebrate the hero’s homecoming.
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) was the bright antithesis to his slightly older contemporary Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Where Hopper the fine artist worried away at the cracks in American society, seeing evidence of disfunction and alienation at every turn, Rockwell the illustrator found (or invented)...
