America's portrait artist.

• Author: Evans, Zenon
• Position: Briefly Noted - American Mirror - Brief article - Book review

Deborah Solomon's American Mirror (Farrar Straus Giroux) is an engaging look at the life and art of Norman Rockwell, the nation's most iconic illustrator. The biography offers compelling reasons to recognize Rockwell as more than a mechanical creator of charming but shallow paintings, even though many fine art critics and Rockwell himself saw him that way.

Solomon deftly critiques Rockwell's work and (too often) psychoanalyzes it in relation to the artist's allegedly deviant sexuality. Some of her bold claims are undermined by inaccuracies in her descriptions of several...