232
DWIGHT MACDONALD
you can tell a story in a picture and if a reasonable number of
people like your work, it is art. Maybe it isn't the highest form of
art, hut it's art nevertheless and it's what I love to do. I feel that
I
am doing something when
I
paint a picture that appeals to
most people. This is a democracy, isn't it?
To which last the reply is, in terms of Rockwell's covers, "Yep,
sure is." Yet, despite this credo, which every popular artist
should have printed in red and black and hung over his draw-–
ing-board alongside Kipling's
If,
Rockwell still keeps worry–
ing. He had another crisis a couple of years ago, at sixty-five,
when he again wondered what he might have done "if I hadn't
gone commercial" and again began to talk of Picasso as "the
greatest" ; he took a year off to do some Serious painting
(except for a mere six
Post
covers), with results unknown to
me. He
also
wrote his autobiography. It is being serialized in
the
Post.
The other condition for success in Masscult is that the
writer, artist, editor, director or entertainer must have a good
deal of the mass-man
in
himself, as was the case with Zane
Grey, Howard Chandler Christy, Mr. Lorimer of the
Post,
Cecil
B. DeMille, and Elvis Presley. This is closely related to sincerity
-how can he take his work seriously if he doesn't have this
instinctive, this built-in vulgar touch? Like Rockwell, he may
know that
art
is good and honorable and worthy of respect,
and he may pay tribute to it. But knowing it is one thing and
feeling it is another. A journalistic entrepreneur like Henry Luce
-by no means the worst-has the same kind of idle curiosity
about the Facts and the same kind of gee-whiz excitement about
rather elementary ideas (see
Life
editorials passim) as
his
mil–
lions of readers have. When I worked for him on
Fortune
in
the early 'thirties, I was struck by three qualities he had as an
editor: his shrewdness as to what was and what was not "a
story," his high dedication to his task, and his limited cultural
background despite, or perhaps because of,
his
having attended
