In a message dated 10/9/10 6:39:52 PM, [email protected] writes:
> Granted there is much to sneer at in Rockwell, but for some of us there > is > also much to admire and, indeed, to respond to. Go here, and scroll down > to > the cover with the two heads of Bertrand Russell (Rockwell? Doing a cover > for Ramparts Magazine?!) > I read the biography and went to the museum because I liked a lot of the paintings,which like most people I knew as Saturday Evening Post covers. The museum doesn't have many of the best covers,and Rockwell did very little freestanding work. Worse yet, one of my favorites, of the truck going through the alley, was so thoroughly deconstructed as impossible the way Rockwell had painted it and in any case taking trucks through a narrow alley a very common feat-here followed long accounts of much more skillful exploits, some involving tire pressure,since I was talking to a trucker-in any event I was disillusioned and wondered how many of the other covers might reveal only a couch sitting ignorance and imagining of their situations. The painting of Stockbridge at Christmas ,done in the middle sixties, appeared in that year's McCall's December issue and I am bound to say that I found it disappointing in a way difficult to explain. I saw the painting this summer-he had done much of it in ink touchups,like an Antonio GAudi, a contemporary of CAnaletto's,and I wasn't fond of GAudi either. All in all , Rockwell isn't a patch on N C Wyeth, whose paintings are much better than the illustrations they were used for. Kate Sullivan
