Norman rockwell gay
More than any other profession, art criticism creates temptations to say stupid things. It's the duty of every critic to resist those temptations.
That was my thought after reading Blake Gopnik's silly review in the New York Times of the current J.C. Leyendecker exhibition in New York.
People have long understood that Leyendecker was gay, and that his sentiments emerged in his paintings of dashing and muscular men. But in recent years, there has been an effort to abscond with Leyendecker's legacy, injecting male lover connotations into every brush stroke, and transforming the musician into a clandestine warrior for same-sex attracted rights, while neglecting his broader array of artistic talents that produced 322 brilliant covers on a wide variety of subjects for The Saturday Evening Post.As far as I can tell, this unfortunate trend began in 2008 in the poorly researched book, J.C. Leyendeckerby Judy Goffman Cutler and Laurence Cutler. It was certainly appropriate for those authors to letter that Charles Beach, Leyendecker's model for the famed Arrow man, "was not only a lesbian but a kept man, the live-in lover of the famed artist who thrust himself int
Was Norman Rockwell Gay?
Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not possess noticed.
—Norman Rockwell
Born in Novel York City in 1894, Norman Rockwell always wanted to be an artist. Rockwell found victory early. He painted his first commission of four Christmas cards before his sixteenth birthday. While still in his teens, he was hired as art director of Boys’ Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America, and began a successful freelance career illustrating a variety of young people’s publications.
At age 21, Rockwell’s family moved to New Rochelle, New York, where Rockwell set up a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe and produced work for such magazines as Life, Literary Digest, and Country Gentleman. In 1916, the 22-year-old Rockwell painted his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post, the magazine considered by Rockwell to be the “greatest show window in America.” Over the next 47 years, another 321 Rockwell covers would appear on the cover of the Post. Also in 1916, Rockwell married Irene O’Connor; they divorced in 1930.
The 1930s and 1940s are g
AMERICAN MIRROR: THE LIFE AND ART OF NORMAN ROCKWELL
CITY OF NIGHT
HAPPINESS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION
AMERICAN MIRROR: THE LIFE AND ART OF NORMAN ROCKWELL
BY DEBORAH SOLOMON
$28; Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This major look at the work of illustrator Norman Rockwell is a sober, serious, thoughtful analysis of a significant artist and how his life influenced his work. But that doesn't mean a review of the book depend on maintain such high standards. Whenever anyone asked what I was reading, I said "a biography of Norman Rockwell" and immediately added, "It turns out he was probably lgbtq+, even if Rockwell himself didn't quite realize it." Oh really, they perked up?
Author and critic Deborah Solomon's book doesn't belabor the point or make too much of it, or to be more precise doesn't shift it into gossip. Love me, she doesn't detect the idea shocking nor downplay what it might mean. But the bloke who symbolized American heartland values spent decades in therapy and rarely attended religious services? Had three marriages that were almost comical in their abruptness? (Rockwell didn't have marriages of convenience so much as convenient marriages.) Two of them at least wer
(Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar....)
Over the last year or so, Deborah Solomon’s biographyof Norman Rockwell has gotten a lot of attention, some laudatory, some extremely negative. Recently, the Modern York Times listed it in its 100 “Notable” books of 2014. This is unfortunate, for while the guide is indeed notable, I don’t feel its notoriety is the sort implied through its inclusion on such a list. It’s mainly notable for its outrageous falsifications and distortions.
So, you request, what is so wrong with Solomon’s book? See my previous postfor some links that will answer that scrutinize for you. Here, I’ll just summarize. Solomon is the sort of art critic who leaps immediately to the most facile and gross sexualizations imaginable. In the case of Rockwell, this approach applies not merely to the artworks, but to Rockwell himself. Solomon presents Rockwell as a pedophile and as a repressed homosexual. (She admits that she has no evidence that Rockwell ever molested any children. But creature a pedophile is a function of desires, not of actions. She also admi