Rockwell's 1921 work evokes both the past and the permanent. (Detail of "No Swimming"; Curtis Publishing Co. - Courtesy The Norman Rockwell Museum) E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version

By Ferdinand Protzman
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, August 10, 2000; Page C01

I was standing in the Corcoran Gallery of Art recently, looking at "No Swimming," a painting by Norman Rockwell. It shows three wet, partially clad boys and a small dog dashing past a hand-painted sign bearing the artwork's title. Only the kid in the middle is looking back, wide-eyed. His pals are face forward, running like a man with a shotgun was on their trail.

The painting was reproduced as the cover image of the Saturday Evening Post on June 4, 1921. Now it's part of the touring exhibition "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People," a show that is awe-inspiring, irritating, corny, charming, sad, confusing, compelling and quintessentially American. Such is Rockwell's power 22 years after his death that a group of top-notch Washington artists were inspired to show their works and comments in a fascinating counter-exhibit called "Rockwellian Times," at 57 N Fine Art.

People seem to either love or hate Rockwell's work. That duality was on my mind at the Corcoran. As I scribbled notes in front of "No Swimming," an arty, thirty-something couple--black clothes, dueling ear studs--came along. Overhearing their comments was unavoidable.

The picture was well painted, the man said, but trite, a stereotype, irrelevant today. The woman labeled it cute but absurdly idealistic, a "squeaky-clean" image of white America. They moved on. I stayed put, contemplating the smoldering remains of my childhood.

There was a gravel pit in my neighborhood in central Illinois, a deep 10-acre pond surrounded by barbed wire and hand-painted signs saying "No Swimming." In summertime during the 1960s, it was a magnet for little boys. We spent countless afternoons trying to sneak in to fish or swim.

The allure wasn't the water, and it wasn't that we didn't have anything better to do. We all belonged to swim clubs. Our town had lots of recreational programs. But only the gravel pit could provide the adrenaline rush of swimming where it was forbidden, the flirtation with getting caught, the flat-out danger.

For the pit was guarded by a man with a double-barreled shotgun loaded with rock salt. More than once, my friends and I fled from him in total panic. Getting hit with salt hurt a lot. But we kept going back. We weren't all white, we didn't know we were stereotypes, we sure weren't clean, and we'd never heard of Norman Rockwell.

But he knew us. That's what makes Rockwell such a fascinating artist. By design and instinct, he was able to encapsulate bits and pieces of American life. Some of his images are still as fresh and relevant as anything being painted today. Others serve as colorful, poignant and thoughtful reminders of the way things were not so long ago. And some, like "No Swimming," are both. No other 20th-century American artist could paint pictures like that.

What links those kids from 1921 to my generation and to the kids of today is the search for thrills. Listen to the skateboard whiz kids on television talk about their sport, and it boils down to one thing: They love the rush. Rockwell never saw "The X Games." But he'd recognize the kids' motivation, and he'd paint them soaring through the air better than any other artist could.

A lot of art world types dislike Rockwell for having such a keen eye for the universal elements in American life. Others despise his remarkable technical skills. Look up Rockwell in a dictionary of art and artists. He may not be there, because he's generally classified as an illustrator, not a fine artist.

Yet the same reference works laud Albrecht Durer for having worked as an illustrator and praise Honore Daumier for his manifold talents, which were employed to illustrate political and social themes.

Not Rockwell. He's too common, too American, too lacking in irony to be taken seriously.

Or so it was. Now prominent art historians are doing double takes and suddenly finding Rockwell deep and complex. Most of the 16 Washington area artists whose works are in "Rockwellian Times" also take him seriously. But the majority of them seem to zero in on the things Rockwell didn't paint.

Stuart Gosswein, for example, depicts five couples, in close-up head shots, kissing passionately. He contrasts this with the "proper distance" maintained by amorous young couples in Rockwell's art.

It's a specious comparison. Rockwell was painting pictures for the cover of a mainstream national magazine. Even today, such publications shy away from overtly sexual imagery.

Donna Coleman and Michael Platt zero in on something more significant: the severe underrepresentation of African Americans in Rockwell's work. Coleman depicts scenes of African American life in a vividly detailed, Rockwellian style. Platt's computer print shows a beautiful, unsmiling young black girl staring straight at the viewer over the words "Mr. Rockwell, what took you so long?" That's a legitimate question. But it seems it should be addressed to American society, not just the artist.

Tom Mullany's view of Rockwell is more benign. He sees him as a skilled artist who loved his country and used common things to represent larger ideas. In Mullany's picture, he does just that by showing his mother ironing the American flag, which she would hang outside on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

But the painting that best captures Rockwell's power and complexity is Michal Hunter's "Triple Self Portrait," which she intended as a play on Rockwell's painting of that title. Hunter mimics his pose, painting herself sitting on a stool in the nude, peering into a mirror while painting herself.

Small, iconic pictures of her life are affixed to the canvas, echoing the self-portraits of Durer, Picasso, Rembrandt and van Gogh that Rockwell put on his. But the image she is painting on the canvas is largely unformed, where his is well defined, if enigmatic.

"What began as an idea for a simple parody of Rockwell's 'Triple Self Portrait' developed into a personal acknowledgment of my own current identity crisis," Hunter wrote in a statement. I think Rockwell would understand. In painting after painting, he showed there's more to life than meets the eye.

Rockwellian Times, at 57 N Fine Art, 57 N St. NW, through September. Open by appointment. 202-387-1217.

Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW, through Sept. 24. Daily 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursdays until 9 p.m. (closed Tuesdays). 202-639-1700.