Norman Rockwell.

By Karal Ann Marling. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 160 pp. 50 black-and-white illustrations and 50 color plates. $45.

Robert Rosenblum

Norman Rockwell keeps pricking my art-historical conscience. First there was the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1985, where I saw, right in the midst of Picasso, Mondrian, and Miro, a picture of a spunky little girl with a back eye sitting in a principal's office. An adventurous new curator, Gregory Hedberg, had elevated this Rockwell canvas from the storeroom to the twentieth-century pantheon upstairs, and there it stuck out like a sore but mesmerizing thumb. I had been taught to snicker at Rockwell, but if it had already become respectable to admire the infinite detail, the dramatic staging, and the disguised symbols of Victorian genre painting, why couldn't the same standards apply here?

The question was shelved until 1996, when I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as much to see Robert Stern's new building (1993) as the art within this Berkshires shrine. And there, without the distractions of modern art, I became an instant convert, wondering how anybody but the most bigoted Modernist could resist not only the mimetic magic of Rockwell's paintings, but the way they transformed a mind-boggling abundance of tiny observations - a choice of tie, an upholstery pattern, a hair-do, a plate of celery - into essential props for the stories he told. And lest we think we've been had by a populist conjurer when we peer through Rockwell's immaculate looking glass, we're in good company. As Karal Ann Marling points out in this sharp-eyed, sprightly monograph, John Updike (a better amateur art writer than most of the professionals) is also a fan, and once troubled to explain why.

Marling, whose staggering knowledge of Americana extends from King Vidor to refrigerator design, is the perfect companion in Rockwell Country. Examining his Saturday Evening Post covers (1916-63) and his later work for Look as if they were Van Eycks, she also illuminates the changing crises of Rockwell's professional and personal life, and the myths and facts of twentieth-century America. It's a long chronicle that takes us from Horatio Alger to John Steinbeck; from the Colonial Revival to the Eames chair; from the advice of Rockwell's boss, Post editor George Horace Lorimer, "never to show colored people [on the cover] except as servants" to the conscience-raising images Rockwell made for Look in the '60s, documenting the traumas of desegregation in the South. A 1921 cover of a bunch of Booth Tarkington kids whose idea of violating the law is ignoring a NO SWIMMING sign present a quaint vision of American innocence. The 1964 foldout The Problem We All Live With, a picture of an immaculately dressed black girl named Ruby Bridges being accompanied to school by four US marshals, while white crowds threaten and jeer, spotlights one of America's ugliest realities. Here, in contrast to the tidy, regimented procession of white guards and black child, Rockwell gives us a city wall marked by the partly effaced graffiti scrawl "Nigger" and by the remnants of a hurled tomato, a visceral burst of pink skin and pulp that looks like the aftermath of a firing squad.

Or perhaps it looks like a Cy Twombly. Such occasional shocks of familiarity may help us plug Rockwell into more respectable versions of twentieth-century art. In Connoisseur, 1962, he pinpoints the puzzlements of new-fangled abstraction, inventing a plausible Jackson Pollock (whose drip techniques Rockwell apparently enjoyed imitating). Is this a Mike Bidlo avant la lettre? And for a new kind of spine-chilling social realism, try Rockwell's Southern Justice, 1965, an eerily lit document of the murder of three civil rights activists, which foreshadows Leon Golub's gruesome close-ups of contemporary brutality.

As Marling points out, Rockwell agonized about being classified as an illustrator rather than an artist, and she takes pains to indicate his connections with museum-worthy traditions. She reminds us, for instance, of his Paris sojourn in 1923, when he was temporarily lured by modern art, and of his later avowal that Picasso was "the greatest." (I even wondered whether his Girl at the Mirror, 1954, in which an anxious preteen compares herself to a glamour-puss photo of Jane Russell, couldn't be read as a homespun homage to Picasso's masterpiece at MOMA.) While claiming that Rockwell was a great artist in the realist tradition that runs from Eakins to Estes, Marling also has him straddle the Modernist fence, summing up his Shuffleton's Barbershop, 1950, a plate-glass-window view of rooms beyond luminous rooms, with the equation "William Sidney Mount + Mark Rothko = Norman Rockwell."

But I, for one, am happy now to love Rockwell for his own sake, and not because he learned some tricks from Mondrian. Planar geometric asymmetries may provide the skeleton for The New TV Set, 1949, but it's more important that the picture distills that delirious moment when Americans began attaching TV antennas to their roofs, symbolically replacing the church spires in the background. And for wartime nostalgia on the home front, there is Rosie the Riveter, 1943, in which Michelangelo's Isaiah becomes a muscular, lipsticked redhead equipped with a lunch box, a phallic rivet gun, a sandwich, and a copy of Mein Kampf underfoot. What a lot of academic ink could be spilled about nascent feminism in this campy icon of macho womanhood!

It is a tribute to Rockwell's diverse powers that his art now seems to look in so many directions. If any quibble can be made about Marling's lively and informative text, it is that we now need a richer visual context for his art, including such transatlantic parallels as the Swede Carl Larsson's popular illustrations of domestic bliss. She mentions some of his contemporaries in the world of commercial art, such as J.C. Leyendecker, but illustrations of their work might have given us a clearer measure of Rockwell's stature. She overlooks Ben Shahn, whose impact on Rockwell's later style and social evangelism must have been huge. I also wish that she had commented on Robert Stern's postmodern housing for Rockwell's art, a witty fusion of squeaky-clean Colonial revival and sophisticated Neoclassic detail. But the larger point is that, thanks to her passion for this artist and for the America that steered his public course, we have a new-born Rockwell who can no longer be looked at with sneering condescension and might well become an indispensable part of art history. In order to enjoy his unique genius, all you have to do is relax.

Robert Rosenblum is a contributing editor of Artforum.