One of the most popular artists of the last century, Norman Rockwell specialized in warm and humorous scenes of routine small-town life. His countless illustrations of ordinary middleclass Americans for the Saturday Evening Post are still among the most indelible images in all of postwar art. Today, opinions of Rockwell vary from uncritical admiration to sneering contempt, but those who love him and those who dismiss him do seem to agree on one thing: his art embodies a distinctively American style of innocence.
Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence reimagines Rockwell as an American Freud, or a canny and remorseless diagnostician of the purity in which we bathe ourselves. Richard Halpern here argues that Rockwell’s works might look like innocent portraits of everyday life, but if you look a little bit closer and probe beneath their banal veneer, you’ll find a lot of them teeming with perverse acts of voyeurism and sexual desire. For Halpern, Rockwell is an artist who we have not yet dared to see for the complex creature that he is: a wholesome pervert, a knowing innocent, a kitschy genius, and an unexpected influence on more contemporary visual artists such as John Currin, Frank Moore, and Eric Fischl.
Read the press release. We also have an excerpt from the book.