Four Freedoms (Norman Rockwell) - Critical Review

Critical Review

Rockwell is considered the "quintessential middlebrow American artist". As an artist he is an illustrator rather than a fine arts painter. Although his style is painterly, his work is produced for the purpose of mass reproduction, and it is produced with the intent of delivering a common message to its viewers via a detailed narrative style. Furthermore, the vast majority of Rockwell's work was viewed in reproduced format and almost none of his contemporaneous audience ever saw his original work. Also, Rockwell's style of backwoods New England small-town realism, known as regionalism, was sometimes viewed as out of step with the oncoming wave of abstract modern art. Some say his realism is so direct that he abstains from using artistic license. John Canaday, a New York Times art critic once referred to Rockwell as the "Rembrandt of Punkin' Crick" for his aversion to the vices of big city life. Dave Hickey derided Rockwell for painting without inflection. Some critics also view his sentimental and nostalgic vision out of step with the harsh realities of American life, such as The Great Depression. Some have summarized this combination by saying that Rockwell's Four Freedoms lack artistic maturity. Others point to the universality of the Freedom of Religion as disconcerting to practitioners of particular faiths. Others complained that he idealized American life because by depicting wholesome, healthy, and happy sentiments Rockwell depicted the good that was remembered or wished for, but by avoiding misery, poverty, and social unrest, he failed to demonstrate command of the bad and the ugly parts of American life. Rockwell's response to this criticism was, "I paint life as I would like it to be."

Although all four images were intended to promote patriotism in a time of war, Freedom from Want, which depicts an elderly couple serving a fat turkey to what looks like a table of happy and eager children and grandchildren has given the idyllic Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving work as important a place in the enduring marketplace of promoting family togetherness, peace and plenty as Hallmark at Christmas.

The commercial success of the series is in part because each painting is considered to be a model of understandable art by the general public. The success of Rockwell's depictions was due to his use of long-standing American cultural values about unity and respect of certain institutions while using symbols that enabled a broad audience to identify with his images. This understandability made it one extreme on the scale of artistic complexity when comparing the series to contemporaneous art. It was diametrically opposed to abstract art and far removed from the intrigue of surrealism.

In 1999, the High Museum of Art and the Norman Rockwell Museum produced the first comprehensive exhibition of Rockwell's career that started at the High Museum on November 6, 1999, stopped at the Chicago Historical Society, Corcoran Gallery of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, and Norman Rockwell Museum before concluding at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on February 11, 2002. Although there has been a long history of Rockwell detractors, during this Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People touring exhibition attendance was record-setting and critical reviews were quite favorable. The nostalgia seemed to cause a bit of revisionism in the artworld, according to The New York Times which said, "What's odd is the show's enthusiastic reception by the art world, which in a lather of revisionism is falling all over itself to embrace what it once reviled: the comfy, folksy narrative visions of a self-deprecating illustrator..."