Norman Rockwell: Campbell v. Schjeldahl v. Updike

It’s interesting to see how three first-rate critical minds channel Norman Rockwell. Recently, London Review of Book’s art critic, Peter Campbell, reviewed Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition of Rockwell’s works, saying that, “The artwork is pukka oil painting” ("At Dulwich Picture Gallery," London Review of Books, January 20, 2011). I confess when I read that, I didn't know what "pukka" meant. I'm still not sure. At first glance, I thought Campbell was saying that Rockwell’s pictures made him ill. I recalled Peter Schjeldahl saying something similar a number of years ago in a New Yorker review of a Rockwell retrospective. Schjeldahl said, “The absolute absence of mystery in his art makes me sick” (“Fanfares for the Common Man,” The New Yorker, November 22, 1999; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). But I see in the dictionary that “pukka,” though it looks and sounds ugly, is actually an adjective of praise, meaning either “genuine” or (informal) “excellent.” So what's Campbell saying? I interpret his statement to mean that Rockwell’s artwork is high quality oil painting. The problem with this interpretation is that it conflicts with what he later says in his review: “He was a terrific phenomenon, not a terrific painter.” When Campbell says this, he’s responding to a remark made by Schjeldahl (“Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t”) that is quoted in the Dulwich exhibition catalogue. I take it that when Campbell says that Rockwell is a terrific phenomenon, he’s referring to Rockwell’s ability to paint the telling image. Campbell says, “The end to which Rockwell worked was the telling image, not the precious artefact.” But, when Campbell looks at some of Rockwell’s images, he finds, “hopeful platitudes,” “winsome notions,” “a folksy version of the American dream.” In perhaps the finest sentence in his piece, Campbell says about Rockwell’s comic images, “The gestures and expressions, like those in silent movies, caricature real frowns and smiles – over-salt and over-sweet.” I detect ambivalence at the heart of Campbell’s review. He likes Rockwell’s painting technique, but he's not crazy about his subject matter.

Peter Schjeldahl, in the aforementioned New Yorker review, says something similar, only his reaction to some of Rockwell’s images is much more intense. For example, in regard to Rockwell’s Girl at Mirror (1954), he asks, “Why, oh why, must she have a goddam movie magazine on her lap?” He answers: “O.K. I know. Rockwell’s principled sense of narrative cogency demanded that every visible action have a visible cause. But the effect is suffocating.”

But Schjeldahl also says, “Rockwell painted well.” He describes Rockwell’s technique as follows:

His surprisingly large, dense, and sumptuous canvases seem excessive to the requirements of designs for magazine covers. He mastered a sort of hurry-up chiaroscuro, starting with a transfer drawing that was derived from many preliminary sketches, photographs, and oil sketches, and then working out tones in a warm grayish-purple, Mars violet. Then he would apply varnish, so as not to disturb the painting’s underlayer while he revised the scumbled lights and shadows to construct images that are at once photographically vivid in their details and painterly over all.

Schjeldahl’s opinion is that “Rockwell is some kind of great artist.” This, too, seems a shade ambivalent; but when you consider the illness and suffocation that Schjeldal says he feels when he looks at Rockwells, it’s also downright generous. Is there a way of appreciating Rockwell’s art that doesn’t mix negative with positive?

Let’s seek a third opinion. John Updike, in a review called “Tote That Quill” (The New Yorker, August 14, 1978; collected in Updike’s superb Hugging the Shore, 1983), says this about Rockwell:

One must turn to America’s Great Illustrators to see how he evolved from a young imitator of J. C. Leyendecker, even to the showily parallel brushstrokes (Post cover, 1919), into a hyper-realist whose barbershop interior (Post cover, 1950) yields nothing in skill and reflective interplay to a Richard Estes. It differs from an Estes in the coziness of the details Rockwell has chosen to illuminate, and in its central cozy implication that at the back of every small-town barbershop lurks a bunch of music-loving old men; but the barber chair, the reflected light on the stovepipe, the crack in the corner of the big window the viewer is looking through – this is amazing painting.

Updike liked that picture of the barbershop interior (it’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop, 1950) so much that, in a piece titled “Acts of Seeing” (included in his great collection More Matter, 1999), he described it again, savoring every detail:

The boots and rubbers, for instance, in front of the stove, with its red-hot coals, and, in the diagonally opposite corner, the ghostly row of old shaving mugs in the top cells of the obsolete cabinet, between the ceiling fixture of frosted glass and the little gooseneck lamp. One’s eye, traveling around the edge of the painting, encounters a whisk broom, an Indian-shuttered window frame, a porcelain basin, a rack of comic books, two knobbed chairs, a mullion with parched putty, a carved crack in the corner of a window pane, a spindleback settee, shelves holding old magazines, a gun, fishing tackle, and all along the top, the gilt appliqué letters spelling BARBER. The eye naturally swoops through the front window to the luminous, man-crammed rectangle of the back room, skimming through the shadows of the closed shop, past the listening cat, the magnificent old barber chair, the hairy broom, the little cracked mirror, the wartime poster of a torn flag, into the bright chaste chamber where music is made. The most brilliant passages of painting, perhaps, depict the standing violinist, all but dissolved in light, and the reflections on the foreshortened piece of stove pipe leading into the wall. But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life.

If you believe, as I most certainly do, that art is in the detail, you will likely find that Updike’s extraordinary description of Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop clinches the case for Rockwell’s greatness. After you read a passage like that, concern about the meaning of “pukka oil painting” seems irrelevant.

Credit: The above illustration is Norman Rockwell's Charwomen in Theatre - Study (1946).