Norman Rockwell - Paintings and Magazine Covers at the Tacoma Art Museum

We had The Saturday Evening Post when I was a child and a student. None of our magazine copies resonate for me apart from the fame so many of the images have. I remembered liking these. We certainly had the magazine every week.

So I visited the whole set of the magazine covers by Norman Rockwell at the Tacoma Art Museum today. I visited on Art Walk but the rooms were very crowded. This time the museum also featured the new exhibit of a very high wall of the blankets Chihuly has collected since the 1970s. These face a very high wall of portraits of Native Americans.

When Rockwell represented a catholic, he used props and costumes which were familiar to the protestants - a rosary, and December 23, 1944, two nuns in black and white habit part of a crowd in a railroad station that includes a red cap, who is an African American.

Rockwell's core characters are a really specific little Anglo-American group. This small group was presented as the genuine America. I think the media has chosen not to portray immigrants - none of my grandparents spoke English when they came to the United States in the later nineteenth century. In fact some Scandinavian Americans were in America along with other immigrants from other continents. The exhibit features art by Norman Rockwell about the Civil Rights Movement.

The work was very popular. Although I certainly remember liking the Saturday Evening Post pictures, I am sure the question of the lasting meaning of Norman Rockwell -( well, does any art have a meaning that lasts )- should be about publishing as an industry and that the work was made for immediate print in mass media.