Oil painting Frame

Oil painting Frame
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That's how I feel about the big Norman Rockwell exhibition that opens today at the Detroit Institute of Modern art . Well, hate isn't exactly right. I find Rockwell to be a virtuoso illustrator, a master storyteller and concoctor of escapist nostalgia and fantasy. He can be funny and, of course, he tugs at the heartstrings as relentlessly as Old Yeller.And believe it or not, Rockwell, once derided as the Rembrandt of Punkin' Crick, has found a home in American museums. The handmade oil paintings of high culture are still wrangling over whether his arrival is a sign of decadence or redemption, but no matter how you look at it, Rockwell remains a special case.He is an Animal painting in complete command of his technique and whose iconic images have left an indelible mark on the American imagination. He is endlessly fascinating for the questions his idealized apple pie-and-mom iconography and easy-to-grasp pictures raise about the perils of popularity, the hegemony of the mass media and the evolving notions of fine art, kitsch and the avant-garde.

"American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell," first organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., but smartly reconceived by the DIA, includes 43 oil paintings, all 323 of the artist's Saturday Evening Post covers and the ubiquitous "Four Freedoms" posters from World War II. The show, which runs through May 31, makes the Landscape oil painting case that there was more to Rockwell than meets the eye, without, gratefully, trumpeting him, as others have, as a Yankee version of a Dutch master like Vermeer.

But with a handful of exceptions, the paintings here are dead on arrival. There is no life in the surfaces. The brushwork and color lay mute. Many pictures are so overstuffed with detail they suggest clogged Impression painting. It's reasonable to forgive the parade of freckle-faced children, fuzzy family scenes, small-town syrup and triumphant Waspism -- a falsely sanitized picture of the American experience
on the grounds that Rockwell was, after all, an ad man Oil painting Frame a mirage designed to sell everything from magazines to corn flakes. (2 of 4)