” To be more specific: the ‘potentially disturbing’ materials Rockwell offers to view are often sexual in nature, even perverse…Rockwell’s paintings, I’ ve found, are able to induce a kind of hysterical blindness in many viewers, who can’t or won’t see what is staring them in the face…In a sense my whole argument is summed up in that one gesture: the containment of the perverse under the sign of the normal” ( Richard Halpern: Norman Rockwell, The Underside of Innocence)
Norman Rockwell, Before The Shot
An infantilism, a yearning to avoid difficult self examination and a submission to the trap of innocence. The thesis that innocence does not exist and is a construction, a pillar of the American myth is difficult to disavow. An ideological construct designed to reassure and keep personal responsibility in a mental sandbox, a world of infantilism in a lost imaginary paradise of illusion. Consumers in the innocence industry. Rockwell was no different than Disney in his contribution to the innocence industry and the commodification of ecstasy through his illustrations of a lost imaginary utopia which could be mass produced and disseminated. This world existed in perfect harmony with the B movies and steamy pulp fiction of the same era and the optimism on one hand and hopelessness and despair of the other were equally simplistic and marginalized the higher cultures.
The Babysitter, 1942
Halpern assets that American culture is particularly adept at creating the sense of innocence and uniqueness , a de-leveraging from the failings of the old world and uniquely positioned to be continuously ”re-born” culturally as a faith. In God we Trust and he trusts us. An addiction to the sense of itself that has culturally refined disavowal into a high art that could be infinitely renewed and marketed to succeeding generations under the guise of the new.
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Rosie the Riveter, 1943
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