It's an age of globalization. People from some cultures take interest in or otherwise get introduced to those of the others. This is exactly my case. I needed to tell the readers of my Russian-language blog (all from the ex-USSR) about Norman Rockwell and his paintings.

I was short of time and mostly skimmed through the book, mostly stopping to read paragraphs pertaining to featured illustrations. They explained to me, rather uninitiated to depths of American XX cent. culture, the true meaning and circumstances of many of his cult paintings. Although as a great artist he made humor and emotions of his paintings universally understandable, precisely the book's comments helped a lot with the contexts, guaranteeing a far larger satisfaction with every picture. Stories of how such and such painting was concieved or how the casting and the actual drawing process unfolded, what reception it got from models, critics and public provided better understandiing and insights into both America's and Rockwell's life.

I am sure my readers would enjoy my retelling of the circumstances of appearing of "The Russian Classroom". And since I'm from Moscow, maybe we'll manage to find actual models, who sat for the artist.

And until I started reading people's reviews here, was I unaware of author's speculations re artist's intimate life. I gleaned tons of valuable information, but these bits went under my radar. Maybe it is because you already know so much about Rockwell, his art and contexts, that those paragraphs marr your perception of the entire work?

I guess I’m not enough of an art snob to have felt Rockwell wasn’t an artist but merely an illustrator. The major critics of the time belittled his work but I always loved his work and considered it to be a unique and detailed depiction of American life in the 20th century. Deborah Solomon goes through his life with a fine tooth comb and as she passes from one phase to the next she describes his life as it year by year through the art he produced at that time. I knew little to nothing about his personal life. Married three times, Rockwell was an indifferent family man who would rather be in his art studio than anywhere else. He considered himself an illustrator not an artist. When people criticized his work as not really “art” he mostly agreed. He spent years in therapy because he was a terrifyingly shy and insecure man. He traveled the world but was always happiest when he got back to his final home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His legacy is on display there at a museum set up by his last wife and frequented by tens of thousands every year. This was an excellent biography that I am very happy to have read and I can heartily recommend it. ( )

Norman Rockwell always referred to himself as an illustrator, not an artist. He wanted to be an artist, but he didn't think he was good enough. For most of his long career, the art world felt the same way. He lived at a time when Jackson Pollock and other abstract artists dominated the scene. Rockwell, besides being considered old-fashioned, was too popular and simply made too much money to be taken seriously by the art elite.

Yet Deborah Solomon's excellent 2014 Rockwell biography has a telling title: "American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell." To this professional art critic, also a biographer of Pollock, he was indeed an artist, and her book gives him his due as such.

The change in how Rockwell was viewed began late in his life, encouraged by, of all things, the Pop art movement of Andy Warhol and others. If a realistic painting of a soup can can be seen as a work of art, then surely Rockwell's brand of realism qualifies as well. And Rockwell, as Solomon points out, was a much better painter than Warhol. She writes, "Warhol used the techniques of commercial art to make high art, whereas Rockwell used the techniques of high art to make commercial art."

Solomon critiques each of Rockwell's major paintings, telling us how it came to be, who posed for it and how it stands up as a work of art. She does this without downplaying the main objective of a biographer's job, telling a life story. For someone who spent most of his time in his studio painting pictures, Rockwell led an interesting life. He had three wives, met many famous people and traveled a great deal. While his paintings were often considered, rightly or wrongly, a reflection of America's past, some of them, especially his painting of Ruby Bridges, the little black girl in the white dress being escorted to school by federal marshals, helped shape its future. He was, for someone so quiet and unassuming, very influential.

Where Solomon fails her subject is in her attempts to psychoanalyze him, trying to read things into his life and into his paintings that may or may not be there. She says repeatedly that "there is no evidence to suggest that he behaved in a way that was inappropriate" toward the boys who posed for him, yet that doesn't stop her from suggesting that he, at the very least, had inappropriate thoughts. She finds something sexually suggestive about the painting "The Runaway" showing, from behind, a cop and a runaway boy sitting on restaurant stools. Rockwell did paint many pictures of boys, in part because of his Boy Scout calendars, but he also painted many girls, as well as men and women. If he didn't paint sexy women, perhaps his own explanation, that he simply couldn't do it very well, was the truth. Solomon's most ridiculous comment may be when she says Rockwell "squeezed his feet into tight shoes, as if trying to keep the dirtier parts of himself constrained." Or maybe he was vain about big feet or simply preferred tight shoes.

Solomon insists the busy artist devoted too little time to his wives, but she says his second wife, Mary, twice read "War and Peace" aloud to him. How much time would that have taken?

The man had plenty of faults and plenty of insecurities and compulsions, but his biographer does him a disservice by finding shortcomings that may only be in her imagination. ( )

Wow, great historical events and personal details through and through. Leaves you with some questions that you ask yourself from time to time when you see a rockwell painting. The back story in each piece of his art that was featured is just wonderfully human. ( )

A rare biography that is balanced in its treatment of the profiled person. It has high praise for Rockwell's work and good qualities but also shows the downside. He was indifferent as a husband and parent and suffered from multiple neuroses including his obsessiveness. He was in therapy for years with little measure of success to show for it. Also includes many color and black and white inserts that illustrate Rockwell's work at Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere. ( )