Rockwell, Norman (1894-1978)
Despite his distinction as a popular painter of everyday life, Norman Rockwell has, for much of the twentieth century, represented a point of controversy concerning the definition of art and the nature of American culture itself. Although a sizable public embraced the illustrator as America's greatest painter, others have reviled his work as vacuous commercial art depicting a highly restricted spectrum of the national makeup. Rockwell's prominence and the prevailing conception of advocates and critics alike—that his task was to represent America—largely issued from his long association with the popular magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. Even when, in the last decades of his life, Rockwell undertook assignments challenging the conservative cultural values of the Post —values which were mistakenly ascribed to the illustrator as well—his apparently unselfconscious, realistic style remained out of step with contemporary artistic practices. By the end of the twentieth century, he was widely recognized as a highly successful illustrator though not as an artist, his name serving as a shorthand term for the values of small-town America that he so often depicted.
Rockwell himself enjoyed the pleasant irony that, this reputation notwithstanding, he was born—on February 3, 1894—in the paramount metropolis of New York City.
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