American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

Norman Rockwell has always had critics, said Jim Higgins in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As early as 1936, his editor at The Saturday Evening Post was essentially telling him that his cover illustrations were cornpone, that the magazine’s readers didn’t live in “such ‘by heck’ surroundings.” But biographer Deborah Solomon doesn’t make the mistake of dismissing Rockwell’s art because it is insufficiently urbane. In this deeply researched book, we meet an artist who was far more angst-ridden than his illustrations let on, and Solomon’s “sharp and sensible” readings of such classic Rockwell images as Rosie the Riveter make the case that the work, “in all its fussy homeyness,” is worthy of sustained study.

“A skeptic might ask if a new accounting is needed,” said John Wilmerding in The New York Times. Many art historians have championed Rockwell’s draftsmanship and graphic savvy. But Solomon focuses mostly on Rockwell’s life, and there she “offers something new and disturbing.” Plagued by anxiety and hypochondria, Rockwell (1894–1978) was almost socially dysfunctional. His children remembered him as distant; his first two marriages ended badly. Noting the homoerotic undertones in many Rockwell images and reporting that he favored the company of male artists and schoolboy models, Solomon even raises the possibility that Rockwell was gay.

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What we get in the end is a dazzlingly accomplished book “about an accomplished but thoroughly undazzling life,” said Ben Davis in Slate.com. Solomon’s account “only gets truly interesting” very late, when Rockwell stops working at being noncontroversial and makes a sudden public turn toward liberal progressivism. His most famous illustration from the 1960s, which shows a young black girl being escorted to school by federal marshals, still packs a punch. But American Mirror “doesn’t exactly explain” the change in Rockwell, it merely documents it. The man remains “an aloof figure,” his art most interesting when it’s “least Rockwellian.”