“People may long for the comfortable, colourful world represented by images of happy middle-class white people living in an affluent society… but it wasn’t real then and it’s certainly not real now”
Winston Smith, Artist

What gets me is the sheer lack of understanding of a) American culture and history, b) the need for transcendent values, c) the racism and self-righteousness shown in the critics’ responses and d) art itself.
Rockwell spent a good bit of his time recapturing a part of the American Dream that, the critics say, never existed. I can tell you it did. Whether it was in the occasional home of a very few, very blessed individuals, or the mind’s eye of hard-working “everyman,” it existed nonetheless. It still does. The reason America became a great nation was because it was filled with people willing to work and work hard. People who had a dream that didn’t focus on money or pride or even necessarily self. Immigrants from every nation filled the shores with the dream of, not affluence, but “enoughness.” There was not the drive to be rich, famous, or even better than a neighbor at first. Only the drive to be free. Is that naive? Perhaps. Still, as Ben Franklin once said, America is great because Americans are good. The current aspirations for success are different from our fore-fathers. Ours are not so honorable. We don’t just “want.” We want more. We want others to have it too, but aren’t willing to give of ourselves for them to have it. We are, as Father Brown once put it, a “curious compound of impudence and sensitiveness” plus a good helping of arrogance and self-righteousness. We think we are the cream of the crop. Our view is right, our morals are the highest, even our art is real art. We have finally reached the “peak” of culture and wisdom. How self-righteous can we be?

Our fore-fathers knew that if we did not look outside ourselves, we would drown as Narcissus did. They held transcendent views and morals. They hoped. Rockwell’s work visualized that. It gave us a chance to see that where we are is not where we are meant to be. If we are more than the paintings, we were too much, if we were less, we still had something to long for.
It was rare that we were less than his paintings though, for most of his work did not center on financial achievement. The “whiteness” of his work, though narrow, was the readership of the day. It is not excusable, but it is forgivable. For us to condemn that is it not rather a reverse racism? Most of those he painted though were a now-rare class of honorable, hard working men and women who were not afraid of getting their hands dirty. For the critics to say these people didn’t exist makes me think they don’t know enough people; particularly real Christians. They have never experienced actual tolerance – meeting someone who does not think as you do and loving them anyway. Those of us who didn’t “fit” into his idealized world yet had the feeling that someday we would. Not just that we could fit, but that we should. White, black, red or yellow.

And is that not the part of art that is transcendent? Not to focus on the reality of the world as it as though that is all there is; to focus on the filth and say, “This is reality!” All artists get our hands dirty, whether with dirt or with filth. Art is that work that allows us to see that there is more to this world in faith than filth. Filth and dirt are real, but with a little time, effort and courage, with a little vision, they can be made into gardens and clay pottery.