Staring at a Jackson Pollock, a Mark Rothko or a Willem de Kooning can feel odd at times.
These paintings have been hanging for about 70 years now so if we have difficulty today
appreciating them, imagine how hard it must have been in the 50s and 60s.
The tension between representational art and abstract art was at its peak as
abstract expressionism was the dominant American art movement
in the 50s. Through this tension emerged this painting: The Connoisseur.
It was made for the cover of the January 13th, 1962 edition of the Saturday Evening Post
and, if you know the Saturday Evening Post, you know who made this artwork: Norman Rockwell.
During his lifetime, Rockwell was always snobbed out of the art world for being an illustrator, for
making easily-marketable art for large audiences. He was in his late 60s when he made this painting.
And for this Saturday Evening Post cover, Rockwell actually drip painted the canvas
you see in the painting. You can see him here, sometimes with his iconic pipe,
using the same techniques Pollock would, over a decade prior.
Inside the magazine, Rockwell would write “If I were young, I would paint that way myself”.
And, perhaps, he could have made a career out of it.
He submitted parts of this drip painting to different exhibitions where he’d win,
under an Italian name, the first prize and, under the name Percival, an honourable mention.
Years later, when Willem de Kooning saw The Connoisseur, he said “Square inch by square inch,
it’s better than Jackson”. Nobody knows if de Kooning was praising Rockwell,
or disparaging Pollock.
However, this painting didn’t win any honourable mentions or first prizes,
it became a magazine cover.
So what did Rockwell add to the original abstract painting? First, he situated it in a museum or
in a gallery. It’s framed and hung on a wall above a checkered floor. Nothing stands out of
the ordinary until a man confronts the painting, interrupting our own appreciation of the artwork.
The older man gives a narrative to the subject, he’s the one disrupting the lack of narrative
of the painting. Through him, this image turns from an image of an abstract painting,
to the the image of a man looking at an abstract painting. This confrontation is key.
The man versus the art, it’s a clash of opposites. The man is composed and calm,
the art is chaotic and bombastic. The man looks out at this chaos, at this overwhelming swerve of
energy and contemplates it. It’s hard not to think of the german romantic rukenfigur, or a
subject who we only see from the back, iconized by Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.
However, the walking stick has been traded for an umbrella, the hike has been traded for a stroll
in a museum and the contemplation of Nature has been traded for the contemplation of Art.
The great thing about a Rukenfigur, isn’t only that we see through the subject’s eyes,
nor that we can, in a way, live what they’re experiencing,
but the great thing about a Rukenfigur is that we can’t see the subject’s face.
Rockwell loved portraying facial expressions and, very often, the candidness or comedy of his images
were relayed through these expressions. However, the Connoisseur’s face is concealed. We cannot
tell what his reaction is, what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. He could be tearing up,
he could be confused, he could be unimpressed, we don’t know. What this lack of editorial direction
does is that it allows the viewer to interpret the painting the way they want to interpret it.
Someone who loves abstract art will see a man engulfed in the painting, while someone who
isn’t convinced by abstract art might see comedy in the juxtaposition of a nicely painted man
against an abstract background. And this is perfect to attract a large diversified audience.
I immediately saw this as an homage to abstract expressionism, but I can now
also see it as a mockery of it too. This
wouldn’t be the last time Rockwell would open his paintings to interpretation.
I made a video on Rockwell’s Political Art and, in that video, I analyzed The Problem We All Live
With. The painting is undeniably a critique of the violent racist reaction of desegregation, and
we can all agree that The Problem We’re All Living With is the protestor’s racism. However, it didn’t
cross my mind that, to a racist, Ruby Bridges, the black girl in the painting, is, to them, The
Problem We’re All Living With. I highly recommend you watching that video if you haven’t already.
To go back to the Connoisseur, I want to talk about the duality which makes it a compelling
painting. It’s not the clash between the man and the artwork, it’s not the clash between the two
different interpretations, but the clash between traditional representational art
and abstract art. Rockwell was a champion of representational art in an age of abstraction.
Warhol called him “a precursor of the hyper-realists.”
In the age of abstract expressionism, when abstraction overshadowed representational art,
Rockwell combined both in a painting, by situating the esoteric drip painting in a grounded reality.
This is a representational painting of man looking at an abstract painting. In other words,
Rockwell was able to paint an abstract painting and still make it representational.
It’s hard to imagine that this painting wouldn’t have been considered an artwork at
the time. Rockwell painted a traditionally painted subject looking up at abstraction at a time when
abstraction was taking over. It’s an incredibly charged image, but this was a magazine cover,
not a standalone work. To many, this was made by the illustrator of the Saturday Evening Post,
not by an artist. If anything, I’m just glad that now, with perspective,
we can look at Rockwell as the artist he always was, and this painting,
not as a simple illustration, but an incredible work of art.