"Saying Grace," Norman Rockwell
I bet the Frist didn't realize that it would be hosting a contentious art show when it signed up for the Norman Rockwell retrospective that's currently housed in the upper galleries. But Rockwell seems to be on the tip of every news outlet's tongue this week —
“Saying Grace” just sold for a record $46 million at Sotheby's, and
a new biography of Rockwellis garnering tons of attention for its earnest examination of whether Rockwell was gay, a pedophile, or simply repressed. In
an article in Monday's New York Times, Julie Bosman writes that Rockwell's family is in the process of “waging a fierce campaign” against biographer Deborah Solomon.
In the book, Ms. Solomon raises the question of whether Rockwell was gay, writing that he “demonstrated an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men,” and that his marriages may have been a strategy for “controlling his homoerotic desires.” She described a camping trip in Quebec that Rockwell took with his male assistant, during which the men swam and played cards together late into the night, and Rockwell noted in his diaries that his assistant looked “most fetching in his long flannels.” There is nothing, Ms. Solomon cautioned in the book, “to suggest that he had sex with men.” Later in the book, Ms. Solomon writes that “we are made to wonder whether Rockwell’s complicated interest in the depiction of preadolescent boys was shadowed by pedophilic impulses.” She again added a disclaimer: “There is no evidence that he acted on his impulses or behaved in a way that was inappropriate for its time.”
As much as I want to buy into the retroactive intrigue Solomon has hoisted upon Rockwell's life story — I cringed while inspecting “A Day in the Life of a Little Girl,” with its compilation of vignettes that would not fly in today's post-Freudian world — I admit that applying the societal rules of contemporary American culture to another time or place is at best misleading. Remember when everyone made a deal about Bush holding hands with the Saudi prince? Sometimes stuff means something else to other people.
But back to Sotheby's groundbreaking sale of the 62-year-old “Saying Grace.” Before the auction, it had been expected to sell for somewhere between $15 million and $20 million, but instead beat Rockwell's previous record (“Breaking Home Ties” went for $15 million at a 2006 Sotheby's auction) by a long shot. Together with “The Gossips” and “Walking to Church,” the Rockwell auction totaled nearly $58 million.
Watch the video Sotheby's produced for the auction for an interesting side-by-side comparison of what's now a record-breaking painting — and take note of the fact that the punchline of “The Gossips” was that Rockwell based the target of the gossip on his own face. Prophetic, eh?
