American Mirror, Deborah Solomon
American Mirror, Deborah Solomon
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American Mirror
The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

Author: Deborah Solomon

Narrator: Andrea Gallo

Unabridged: 19 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 12/20/2013


Synopsis

Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white school-- here was an America whose citizens seemed to believe in equality and gladness for all. Who was this man who served as our unofficial " artist in chief" and bolstered our country' s national identity? Behind the folksy, pipe-smoking facade lay a surprisingly complex figure-- a lonely painter who suffered from depression and was consumed by a sense of inadequacy. He wound up in treatment with the celebrated psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. In fact, Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts so that he and his wife could be near Austen Riggs, a leading psychiatric hospital. " What' s interesting is how Rockwell' s personal desire for inclusion and normalcy spoke to the national desire for inclusion and normalcy," writes Solomon. " His work mirrors his own temperament-- his sense of humor, his fear of depths-- and struck Americans as a truer version of themselves than the sallow, solemn, hard-bitten Puritans they knew from eighteenth-century portraits." Deborah Solomon, a biographer and art critic, draws on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents to explore the relationship between Rockwell' s despairing personality and his genius for reflecting America' s brightest hopes. " The thrill of his work," she writes, " is that he was able to use a commercial form [that of magazine illustration] to thrash out his private obsessions." In American Mirror, Solomon trains her perceptive eye not only on Rockwell and his art but on the development of visual journalism as it evolved from illustration in the 1920s to photography in the 1930s to television in the 1950s. She offers vivid cameos of the many famous Americans whom Rockwell counted as friends, including President Dwight Eisenhower, the folk artist Grandma Moses, the rock musician Al Kooper, and the generation of now-forgotten painters who ushered in the Golden Age of illustration, especially J. C. Leyendecker, the reclusive legend who created the Arrow Collar Man. Although derided by critics in his lifetime as a mere illustrator whose work could not compete with that of the Abstract Expressionists and other modern art movements, Rockwell has since attracted a passionate following in the art world. His faith in the power of storytelling puts his work in sync with the current art scene. American Mirror brilliantly explains why he deserves to be remembered as an American master of the first rank.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kressel

I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Norman Rockwell, but because of this book, I’m sold on him now! What prompted me to read it was a comment on the call-in show “Indivisible Radio,” which aims to get Americans of diverse points of view to understand each other in these divided times. The comm......more

Goodreads review by Rick

I knew of the controversy regarding this book before I read it but I am stunned at just how bad it was. Solomon provides an interpretation of Rockwell that is so biased as to almost be laughable if it weren't so sad. She sees in his imagery a closeted homosexual and borderline pedophile. Apparently......more

Goodreads review by Steve

[URL not allowed]-1ic Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) is best known for his iconic illustrations which graced the cover of The Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1963. But in addition to these 300+ covers, Rockwell painted or sketched about 4,000 other works of art for use in books, magazines and......more

Goodreads review by Laura

I was very keen to read this book after several excellent reviews in a number of publications, and when I started it I was immediately hooked on the life of an artist who was underestimated during his lifetime by his peers and critics, and who also underestimated himself. Through the first half of t......more