It has become the stock-in-trade of liberal humanities professors, such as Johns Hopkins University English professor Richard Halpern, to claim long-dead cultural icons as their own.
Halpern is the author of Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud and Lacan as well as Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence.
Of certain of Norman Rockwell’s paintings he comments:
· “That son discovering Santa/Dad smooching his mother on the stairway in Christmas Surprise? He’s a voyeur unexpectedly learning the facts of life.
· “The illustration of two entwined Boy Scouts practicing knot-tying in the 1946 Boy Scout calendar? A comment on the boundaries between asexual friendship and Eros.”
Citing the painter’s autobiography, Mal Kline suggests that Rockwell would likely have disagreed with “the couch job” Halpern has visited on his art:
“…I unconsciously decided that, even if [the world] wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and painted only aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played football with the kids, and boys fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard”…
“If there was any sadness in this created world of mine it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems.”
“The people in my pictures aren’t mentally ill or deformed. The situations they get into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the agonizing crises and tangles of everyday life.”