Norman Rockwell
I’d seen plenty of paintings of the Renaissance period but I always preferred Norman Rockwell: his paintings “extract great pictorial drama”. Even better, they made sense (unlike modern art). It was while reading Deborah Solomon’s article on Rockwell that I learnt that the man was “driving in the opposite direction—he was putting stuff into art” in an era where abstract painting “jettisoned the accumulated clutter of 500 years of subject matter in an attempt to reduce art to pure form”! Also, in that era, there was “an invisible red velvet rope separates museum art from illustration” (Rockwell was an illustrator: he drew for magazines, and even worse, got paid). His theme was the American life’s “homelier version steeped in the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of America’s founding in the 18th century”. Yet, when President Roosevelt set a competition for the Four Freedoms series (depiction of America stood for) for use during World War II, Rockwell’s submission was reject