TY  - BOOK
AU  - Halpern,Richard
TI  - Norman Rockwell: the underside of innocence 
SN  - 0226314405 (cloth : alk. paper)
AV  - ND237.R68 H35 2006
U1  - 759.13 22
PY  - 2006///
CY  - Chicago
PB  - University of Chicago Press
KW  - Rockwell, Norman,
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index; Manufacturing innocence -- Ways of not seeing -- Phallic women, Adam's apples, and the fullness of the world -- That kind of man -- History of girls -- Painting: a middlebrow art -- Rockwell's heirs
N2  - "Norman Rockwell's scenes of everyday small-town life are still among the most indelible images in all of twentieth-century art. While opinions of Rockwell vary from uncritical admiration to sneering contempt, those who love him and those who dismiss him do agree on one thing: his art embodies a distinctively American style of innocence." "In this book, Richard Halpern argues that this sense of innocence arises from our reluctance - and also Rockwell's - to acknowledge the often disturbing dimensions of his works. Rockwell's paintings frequently teem with perverse acts of voyeurism and desire but contrive to keep these acts invisible - or rather, hidden in plain sight, available for unacknowledged pleasure but easily denied by the viewer." "Rockwell emerges in this book, then, as a deviously brilliant artist, a remorseless diagnostician of the innocence in which we bathe ourselves, and a continuing, unexpected influence on contemporary artists. Far from a banal painter of the ordinary, Halpern argues, Rockwell is someone we have not yet dared to see for the complex creature he is: a wholesome pervert, a knowing innocent, and a kitschy genius."--BOOK JACKET
ER  -