Norman Rockwell Deconstructed

Academics are trying out a new way to make peace with American icons, namely by turning them into liberals long after their death. Such seems to be Johns Hopkins University (JHU) professor Richard Halpern’s approach to the art of Norman Rockwell.

Johns Hopkins magazine writer Maria Blackburn drew Dr. Halpern out to get his theories on Rockwell’s work. As she recounts:

• “That son discovering Santa/Dad smooching his mother on the stairway in Christmas Surprise? He’s a voyeur unexpectedly learning the facts of life.

• “The illustration of two entwined Boy Scouts practicing knot-tying in the 1946 Boy Scout calendar? A comment on the boundaries between asexual friendship and Eros.”

Dr. Halpern, who teaches English at JHU, has compiled his reflections on Rockwell in the book Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, published by the University of Chicago. His last book was Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud and Lacan, published by the University of Pennsylvania.

For his current venture, he made a careful study of Rockwell’s work. For example, he observes of the painting Girl at Mirror: “I think the posture of the doll is a little strange. It’s skirts are hiked up and it seems to have the mirror’s edge pressed between its legs.”

Rockwell famously contributed many of the cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, such as 1957’s Just Married, which featured two maids standing outside the honeymoon suite of a hotel. “What struck me as odd was that they were holding a dustpan of confetti and they were looking at it with smiles on their faces,” Dr. Halpern told Blackburn. “The perverse pleasure they had seemed so blatant to me, I was just surprised to find that.”

“There’s indisputable evidence that for Rockwell, sometimes sexual jokes are planned in, that they are part of the paintings,” Dr. Halpern concludes. “But also I think that if you just look at enough of his paintings carefully enough and fully enough you’ll just see the same sort of things popping up repeatedly.”

Believe it or not, Dr. Halpern previously taught at both Berkeley and Yale as well as at the University of Colorado at Boulder—home of Ward “Little Eichmanns” Churchill. “Professor Halpern’s interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, especially drama; Shakespeare; modernism; literary theory, especially Marxist and psychoanalytic; aesthetics; science and literature,” according to the JHU website.

Were he alive, America’s painter might take issue with the couch job Dr. Halpern has given his art. “Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be, I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and painted only aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played football with the kids, and boys fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard,” Rockwell wrote in his autobiography.

“If there was any sadness in this created world of mine it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems.”

“The people in my pictures aren’t mentally ill or deformed. The situations they get into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the agonizing crises and tangles of everyday life.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.