We Americans have always had something of a love/hate relationship with the idea of tradition. On the one hand, it gives us a sense of community, place, and knowing who we are. We’re fond of things like holiday traditions that not only bring order out of potential chaos but that provide ways of connecting us to good memories.
On the other hand, going back to the earliest American settlers we’ve seen tradition as a stifling element of social, political, or ecclesiastical construction.It’s been seen as something designed for control, stubbornly unwilling to accommodate the ever-changing variety of human tastes, beliefs, and circumstances.“Go west, young man,” became a tradition largely to escape other traditions.
Art is one of the arenas in which this ambivalence plays out, and the work of American painter Norman Rockwell is often in the middle of the battlefield. Rockwell was born in 1894 in New York City, and lived until 1978.
More than almost any other American artist, Rockwell was concerned with the viability and maintenance of tradition, and that concern became an animating spirit in his paintings.The idea of something worthwhile being passed down through generations is central to Rockwell’s work and you can see it in almost all of his paintings.It can be something as mundane as how to tie a good knot or how to build a birdhouse but it’s the act of reverently passing along that is the real subject of these paintings.
Rockwell gained fame for his paintings of idyllic America, and in much of his work he could be considered a consensus painter rather than a conscience painter.But in the 1960s, he became more of the latter as he occasionally tackled society’s problems and attempted to act as a conscience.His 1964 painting “The Problem We All Live With,” a moving work that portrays segregation and prejudice, was a far cry from the sentimental scenes of Americana that brought him fame.Even when he was using his art to take on injustice and racism, something he did way more than many people realize, he used very traditional styles.
Despite the Modernism with which he was surrounded, Norman Rockwell believed that traditional styles of art could still communicate substantive ideas.But traditonal forms doesn’t always mean safe content that doesn’t challenge the system.
