Norman Rockwell Pictures for the American People

"The catalogue succeeds best in its treatment of Rockwell as an artist worthy of investigation. The 15 contributors' backgrounds range from art history to child psychiatry, making for an unusually broad range of vision. Mixed in with the obligatory but good biographical essays is a hymn to democracy from Dave Hickey, a why-I-still-hate-Rockwell therapy session from Neil Harris, and relentless revisionism from Karal Ann Marling (who, incidentally, reads Rockwell's 1927 Santa Claus as a potential child eater). Weaving the essays into a coherent whole is a thread of personal anecdote, perhaps appropriate to this small-town painter of the anecdotal. The two gems of the catalogue are Wanda M. Corn's discussion of THE CONNOISSEUR from 1962 and Robert Coles's essay on THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH from 1964.Hennessey, Maureen Hart is the author of 'Norman Rockwell Pictures for the American People' with ISBN 9780810963924 and ISBN 0810963922.