Norman Rockwell and the Uncanny Valley

Today, I boldly defied art critic Blake Gopnik and visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Norman Rockwell exhibit. Conclusion: Gopnik is an America-loathing monster. I don't really think that, but after spending two hours with Rockwell's cheerfully unobjectionable Americana, it seems like anyone who can criticize that stuff must be Facebook friends with Osama bin Laden.

The paintings in this exhibit come from collections belonging to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The film-making connection is more than a coincidence: Rockwell's paintings play like one-scene movies, complete with plot, characters, and special effects. Take one of his most well-known works, "Freedom of Speech," a preliminary version of which is housed in the exhibit. When you look at it, you don't see a painting. You see a story unfolding; you can't help but give names and backstories to the noble flannel-jacketed hero and the grumpy New Englanders around him.

Side note: in the original version, the speaker looked like a Hollywood star, with glowingly white skin and symmetric features. Rockwell roughened him up considerably for the final.

One peculiarity of this exhibit was that it occasionally caused me to laugh. Honest laughter, not mocking "Ha ha, this is utter crap" laughter. How often does that happen at an art museum? Rembrandt and Goya and Pollock and the rest of the gang inspire reverence, awe, and occasionally puzzlement, but they are hardly yukmeisters. Imagine how strange I felt, then, to giggle uncontrollably at the sight of this painting.

Like many good artists, Rockwell was especially interested in the act of creation itself; witness his famous triple-self portrait. So we get a painting of an writer hammering away at his typewriter, from which arises a ghostly image of Daniel Boone; a toymaker dabbing paint onto a red-white-and-blue whirligig; and a bearded, grandfatherly man making shadow puppets for an audience of enthralled kids.

My favorite picture--which, unfortunately, I can't find online--also dealt with the imagination. In the foreground sits a scrawny redheaded kid with glasses; he's reading a book and sitting on a couple more. In the background: a fairy-tale knight rises from his imagination. But beneath the knight's visor we see the kid's bespectacled, bucktoothed face.

OK, by now you probably wonder why this post's title references the uncanny valley. Rockwell often used real-life models for his paintings. In one case, he even got an old man to dress in drag and model the part of a shriveled town gossip. But in order to keep photorealistic blandness from creeping into his paintings, Rockwell added a few flourishes to his characters.

Thus, the figures look mostly human, but many have over-exaggerated features that immediately catch your eye. The kids look almost too scrawny, the old men too jolly, the starlets too leggy. At times it's unsettling.

But noooo, Blake Gopnik didn't feel the need to comment on the actual aesthetics of any Rockwell paintings. He had to yammer on about how Rockwell's art upheld the dominant social order and blah, blah, blah. What I'm saying is ignore the criticism and go this exhibit. If you're in DC, of course.