NORMAN ROCKWELL.

• Author: LARSON, CHRISTINA
• Position: Review

NORMAN ROCKWELL Laura Claridge Random House, $35.00

ARTISTS ELIGIBLE FOR CRITICAL ACCOLADES are expected to wrestle down psychological demons. Scholars pontificate upon Sylvia Plath's, The Bell Jar, Edvard Munch's "The Scream," and even Hendrix's "Manic Depression," but how many art historians peruse Norman Rockwell's "Boy Scouts' Calendar"?

If you thought that the great romanticizer of small-town America didn't fit the tortured-creative mold, Laura Claridge's new biography, Norman Rockwell, will change your mind. Its revelations about the artist's private life, which scarcely resemble his defining Hallmark-card iconography, clear the, way for Rockwell to enter the critics' pantheon of serious American artists. (Of course, the rest of us have long been charmed by his command of posture and facial expression and by his fastidious attention to details.)

Having rifled through Rockwell's family medical records and gossiped with old neighbors, Claridge has turned up the sorry details of the longtime Saturday Evening Post illustrator's personal battles with depression and the alleged suicides of his first two wives. In the upside-down world of art criticism, such exposure seems to be a prerequisite to regarding the painter as more than a two-dimensional workaholic patriot.

Claridge's book, released to coincide with a major Rockwell exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is the latest scholarly reappraisal to resist the decades-old exclusion of commercial illustrators from art history syllabi. She reminds us that making a living as an artist often requires accommodating public taste, and that, unlike today's public, the middle-class Americans of Rockwell's time didn't openly discuss Prozac prescriptions or believe that self-expression was always a good thing.

Norman D-Day

Rockwell was born in 1894, a year before Oscar Wilde's "indecency" trials damned the literary virtuoso's career for offending public decorum. As the second son of a Yankee cotton merchant of English descent, Rockwell grew up in Harlem's Morningside Heights, dropped out of high school to attend art school in New York (financed, just barely, by a paper route and some early pupils). He then worked for a boys' magazine as art editor and cover artist before placing his first cover with the Post in 1916, at the age of 22. Except for a brief stint in the Navy (as a varnisher and painter, third-class) during World War I, he worked as an illustrator for his entire life, mostly in New England...