Kitsch: Norman Rockwell's Spurious America

“Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is a two-for-one: a name-dropping exhibition that celebrates the creation of Americana by some of its most uncritical architects.  It runs through to January 2, features fifty-seven Rockwells, borrowed from the collections of blockbuster directors Lucas and Spielberg.  It includes oil paintings and drawing, and a scheduled line-up of good old American celebrations including Scouting Day, viewings of American Graffiti, Saving Private Ryan, and Frank Capra’s greatest hits.   

In our politically volatile times, it seems strange that the Smithsonian would choose Rockwell as its summer money-maker.  While there’s no doubt that marquee names like Rockwell, Lucas and Spielberg will bring bodies through the door, reifying the homogeneity of Rockwell’s America seems almost obtuse.  Though the Smithsonian claims that Rockwell’s paintings – most of which were produced for The Saturday Evening Post – tell stories about the “importance of tolerance in American life,” they're really about little more than the comfort culture of kitsch.  And like most kitsch, Rockwellian America conveys a deliberate and highly constructed innocence, one which dictates particular kinds of sentimental responses.  Stereotypes are clear and present: boys are always scrappy, girls always spunky and parents always wise.  Even Rockwell’s style – a particular kind of realism in which the act of painting can still be detected – plays into his reassurance that his canvasses are art.  It’s a deceptive act, a social machine, as Blake Gopnik wrote in the Washington Post: “The brushstrokes tell us that … America is better than simply real – it belongs to the hallowed realm of art.”

Of course the “art” to which Rockwell admirers cling is hardly the avant-gardism practiced by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionist.  Rather, it is what Clement Greenberg famously described in his 1939 article “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” as “the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.” When Greenberg penned the essay, originally published in Partisan Review, he was attempting to resist the leveling of culture produced by what he termed “capitalist propaganda.” Rockwell was the primary target of his ire.  But given that Rockwell’s fictional worlds are now central to political groups which elevate kitsch as the primary aesthetic of American culture, Greenberg is, perhaps, worth revisiting (it should come as no surprise that the Smithsonian saw its highest attendance during Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally). 

Indeed, Rockwell and the culture he inspired are part and parcel of the style of patriotic American life that is both defined by and thrives on a kind of kitsch aesthetic.  For Greenberg, kitsch represents the “debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture” which “operates by formula.”  Greenberg’s description of Rockwell is spot on: the appeal of his folksiness was that it reassured consumers their resistance to change was noble patriotism.  Take, for example, this war bond newsreel which documents Rockwell’s use of his own neighbors as models for some of his more famous works.  The announcer describes Rockwell’s subjects as “Great Americans, great in the simple fact that they are just folks.” Sound familiar?

Though Greenberg saw Rockwell’s paintings has nothing short of capitalist realism (a criticism that was recently echoed by William & Mary professor Alan Wallach), most reactions embrace the Rockwell’s painterly reduction.  Lucas and Spielberg themselves see Rockwell as a cinematic inspiration, which explains why they’re avid collectors of his work.  Lucas told the New York Times that “Rockwell’s work…illustrates compassion and caring about other people.” Spielberg said “I look back at these paintings as America the way it could have been, the way it someday may again be.” Certainly, Lucas’s and Spielberg’s own cinematic formulas owe a great deal to the kitsch flatness of Rockwell’s America.  But it’s disconcerting to see the painterly realism of Rockwell elevated to some kind of credible record of the past.  New York Times cultural critic Deborah Solomon unironically described the exhibition as a reminder of “America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity.”

If Rockwell’s paintings represent an America defined by national solidarity, it’s because the works themselves are tautological.  They give lie to the comfort of a homogenous national identity in which everyone is white, the working-classes are heroes, and politeness is the epitome of patriotism.  It’s no wonder, then, that Norman Rockwell’s paint-by-numbers America continues to endure. It thrives in a political climate that would see these works not as kitsch or painterly fiction but rather as truthful depiction of a better, by-gone era.