NORMAN ROCKWELL AT HOME

NORMAN ROCKWELL
At Home in Stockbridge,
Masachusetts

THE PAINTER NORMAN ROCKWELL'S STUDIO HAS BEEN RE-CREATED IN THE MUSEUM HONORING HIM IN STOCKBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.

Met a painter ("an amateur painter," she said), who startled me by telling me my photograph of Norman Rockwell (above) looked like a Rockwell painting.

Given that Rockwell (1894-1978) has been gone for more than thirty years, it is fascinating the number of times his name still appears, and his work is used as a ready point of comparison. There has come to be an easy kind of shorthand, with Rockwell's name cropping up in the Stars and Stripes, a local TV station in Salinas, California, and in a political blog: "something a Japanese Rockwell might paint", or "In the Norman Rockwell version, Dad and the kids...", or "Norman Rockwell type Americans who believe in Chevys and Apple Pie."

Picture the politics of it.

Photographs and text by Gwendolyn Stewart © 2011;

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