When the archforger Hans van Meegeren undertook to hoodwink the experts by painting what they accepted as a theretofore unknown Vermeer, his motives were more devious than those of the ordinary counterfeiter. For he believed himself to be an underappreciated painter and Vermeer's equal. The moment his Christ at Emmaus was purchased by the state on the authority of the leading Vermeer specialists, van Meegeren meant to reveal that it was he who had painted this masterpiece. And since the experts believed the painting was by Vermeer, they were obliged in consistency to acknowledge van Meegeren as Vermeer's peer. Much the same form of proof was used by Alan Turing to argue that computers possess intelligence. If a computer printed out a set of answers to a literary quiz that were just like those a human being would have given, then one would have in consistency to attribute intelligence to the machine, since human beings possess it by default. And, with qualifications, something like this form of argument has been invoked by enthusiasts for the art of Norman Rockwell to validate their admiration. Suppose it can be shown that Rockwell employed the pictorial strategies also found in the Dutch genre painters of the seventeenth century? Or that the smiling veteran, seated at the counter in Rockwell's After the Prom, plays the role of an internal observer, in much the way that a lordling does when he looks up the skirt of a woman on a swing in Fragonard's The Swing? Or that the wall before which the little black schoolgirl is being escorted by burly federal marshals in Rockwell's 1964 The Problem We All Live With looks like a Twombly? Since there are these affinities, and since Twombly is in MoMA, Fragonard in the Wallace Collection and Jan Steen in the National Gallery, what save prejudice explains the absence of Rockwell from those validating walls?

No such arguments are needed to prove that Vermeer was a great artist--we learn the meaning of "great artist" through his work. Similarly, we have no need of indirect proof that human beings possess intelligence, for what would intelligence mean if human beings lacked it? No one had to prove the artistic merit of Dutch genre painting--or Fragonard--by appealing to the work of other artists, and in the case of Twombly there are no other artists whose work shows that his must be accepted if theirs is. So why does a case have to be made for Rockwell? Why is there a special problem with him? What makes his work so controversial? In a way, if he weren't as good as he was, the question would hardly arise. No one has undertaken to establish the artistic merit of the large number of Rockwell's contemporaries whose primary venues were the covers of magazines in the golden age of magazine illustration. Almost from the beginning, Rockwell stood out as someone with exceptional gifts. There is no lobby for James Montgomery Flagg or J.C. Leyendecker or N.C. Wyeth or Peter Arno or the legions of other cover artists whose work caught the public's eye on the nation's newsstands. So why not accept him for the wonder he was? None of the artists whose affinity to him has been enlisted in his support had what he had.

"Loving Rockwell is shunning complexity," the critic of the Village Voice declares, who goes on to concede that "many of Rockwell's illustrations can turn you into a quivering ball of mush." Of how many painters in the history of art is something like that true? It seems to me the pictorial psychology of paintings that can have that effect transcends present knowledge. It implies skills of a kind the painters of the Counter-Reformation would have given their eyeteeth to command. Painting is not simply what takes place on the canvas. It is what goes on between the canvas and the viewer. Rockwell was one of the supreme masters of that space, an eroticist of human feeling, a rhetorician of visual persuasion. Small wonder every advertising director in the country was eager to sign him up!

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