Rockwell and Warhol: An unlikely pairing?
Left, "Freedom from Want'' (oil on canvas), by Norman Rockwell, 1943; right, "Campbell's Soup Can'' (color silkscreen on paper) 1969, in the show "Inventing America: Rockwell and Warhol,'' at the Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass., June 10-Oct. 29.
Both of these artists portrayed a kind of romanticism. Rockwell liked to say that he painted things the way he wanted life to be. But as he gotolder, he got tougher in recognizing and representing American society's flaws and the contradictions of human emotions and behavior. The nostalgia in his pictures thinned a bit.
I remember with mild fondness his covers for the old Saturday Evening Post, one of about a dozen magazines we got at our house in the '50s and early '60s, before TV killed so many of them. I looked forward much more to the weekly arrival of Life magazine, with its great photos, than to the rather musty Post.
As a kid, I saw the Rockwell covers as corny. Now, in part because I know a lot more about Rockwell's sometimes troubled life, and having read many of his comments on art, his life and America, I see that his work, besides being technically superb, has far more depth than you'd see from glancing at a Post cover. By the way, one reason he and his wife moved to Stockbridge from Vermont is that Austen Riggs, the famous mental hospital is there. Mrs. Rockwell would be treated at the institution from time to time.
As for Warhol, he deeply appreciated the commercial romanticism (the passion for colorful consumer goods) and the craft of Madison Avenue's high-concept popular art during its post-World War II golden age.
When I lived in New York I saw him a couple of times from a few feet away at downtown Manhattan parties. He seemed expressionless --- cold and creepy.
Both Rockwell and Warhol presented longing --- the former for a safer and friendlier world, the latter for a world of color and humor, in which even the seemingly banal could be infused with a kind of goofy joy.
-- Robert Whitcomb