MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
231
and cliche in execution as in content. "There's this magazine
cover," says the comedian Mort Sahl, "and it shows this kid
getting his first haircut you know and a dog is licking his hand
and his mother is crying and it's Saturday night in the old home
town and people are dancing outside in the streets and the
Liberty Bell is ringing and, uh, did I miss anything?" But
Rockwell is sincere, so much so that he constantly wonders
whether he is living up to his talents. In the 'twenties, accord–
ing to a profile in the
Post,
he went through a crisis as comic
as it was pathetic:
Professional friends, dabbling in modernism, told him he ought
to learn something about dynamic symmetry, and their arguments
worried him ... Rockwell packed up and went to Paris. He attend–
ed
lectures and bought Picassos to hang in his studio for inspiration.
On his return he set about applying what he had learned to
Post
covers. When editor George Horace Lorimer examined the first
new Rockwell offerings, he laid them aside and gave the artist a
paternal lecture on the value of being one's self, pointing out
in
passing that it was conceivably better to have one's work displayed
on the
Post's
covers than embalmed in art museums. Chastened,
Rockwell agreed and went back to being himself. He now refers to
his temporary aberration as "my James-Joyce-Gertrude-Stein
period."
Lorimer's mlsslOnary work was completed by a Stanford
girl
Rockwell married a few years later, a nice sensible young bride
who in good American fashion "helped get
him
back on the
beam and keep him there." In this not exactly Herculean task,
she appears to have succeeded. He was positively defiant some
twelve years ago when he was being interviewed for a
New
Yorker
profile:
My creed is that painting pictures of any kind is a definite
form of expression and that illustration is the principal pictorial
form of conveying ideas and telling funny stories. The critics say
that any proper picture should be primarily a series of technical
problems of light, shadow, proportion, color and voids. I say that
if
