About this item
Welcome to Rockwell Land, writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white schoolhere was an America whose citizens seemed to believe in equality and gladness for all. Who was this man who served as our unofficial artist in chief and bolstered our countrys national identity Behind the folksy, pipe-smoking faade lay a surprisingly complex figurea lonely painter who suffered from depression and was consumed by a sense of inadequacy.
About the Author
Deborah Solomon (born August 9, 1957, New York City) is an American art critic, journalist and biographer. She writes primarily for The New York Times and her weekly column, "Questions For," ran in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011. Her art reviews appear on WNYC Radio. Solomon was born in New York City and grew up in New Rochelle, New York. Her parents, Jerry and Sally Solomon, owned an art gallery. She was educated at Cornell University, where she majored in art history and served as the associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1979. The following year, she received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Solomon began her career writing about art for various publications, including The New Criterion. For most of the 1990s, she served as the chief art critic of The Wall Street Journal. She has written extensively about American painting, and is the author of several biographies of American artists, including Jackson Pollock and Joseph Cornell. Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 in the category of biography.
