By Mr. Curmudgeon
Back in 1999, the Brooklyn Museum of Art sponsored the exhibit “Sensation.” And it certainly lived up to its billing. New York Times art critic Robert Smith observed, “…English painter Chris Ofili, famous at the moment for attaching spheres of shellacked and decorated elephant dung to his canvases…affirms his seriousness and talent as an artist and reflects an expanding vision.” His dung covered “painting” was titled “The Holy Virgin Mary.” In the exhibit’s audio commentary, rock singer David Bowie intoned, “On a damp day its rich, earthy sent wafts elusively around Mr. Ofili’s works.” It is important to remember that the comments referring to the overpowering stench of Ofili’s masterworks are meant as a compliment.
Reviewing a 2009 exhibition of 40 works by American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, Times critic Benjamin Genocchio wrote, “No doubt some viewers find this innocent, even charming. But the more I looked at the works in this show, the more I began to get a sense of something off and possibly even sinister in the Rockwell universe. The artist always seems to be selling something, be it optimism during a time of hardship, patriotism in wartime, or any number of products for which he created seductive illustrations for magazine advertisements.” Fellow Times critic John Canaday simply described Rockwell as “the Rembrandt of Punkin’ Crick.” Rockwell’s first mistake, apparently, was his use of oils and not elephant dung. His second was refusing to use his art, suicide bomber-like, to blow up Judeo/Christian moral order to replace it with…well, nihilists have not quite figured that out yet.
I write this having just returned from “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell” showing at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The forty-two original works encompass a career that stretched form 1916 to the 1970s.
Whether his paintings depict children at play or a young veteran returning home to the happy faces and open arms of his family and friends, Rockwell rendered an idealized picture of what America was at its innocent best. Rockwell used the mass market provided by print publications to portray family life, fair play and common decency – quiet sentiments he thought Americans should aspire to. For his modern critics, Rockwell’s crime is that with paint on canvas he managed to render, simply and powerfully, a moral universe. That Times critics believe optimism and patriotism are mere commercial commodities says more about their limited nihilistic materialism, where everything is for sale (just ask Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid). The truths revealed in Rockwell’s paintings are not tangible comities that stack neatly in rows on a supermarket shelf. They are part of the invisible universe the nihilist says does not exist – yet tirelessly works to overturn. Love, honor, faith are the invisible and powerful forces that move men and women to transcend mere materialism. Images of an American soldier facing death for love of country, the grandmother and child at a diner saying grace or a pair of teenagers experiencing the first pangs of love while sharing milkshake cannot be erased by all the dung-covered parodies of art the nihilist can summon. This drives the crazed nihilist crazy. Rockwell, therefore, is the ultimate artistic provocateur. For bizarre nihilists, Rockwell’s art arouses the very reaction dung-smeared religious icons provoke among the normal and well adjusted.
Of the turbulent early part of the 20th Century, Rockwell recalled, “The 20s ended in an era of extravagance...There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when America believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it.”
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