Get to know another side of Rockwell at the exhibition on display through Sept. 7
“Norman Rockwell: Imagining Freedom” tells the story of a painter who mastered the persuasive powers of art and deployed them as a force for good.
That’s an oversimplification of the just-opened exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, and certainly a reduction of Rockwell’s impact on 20th century pop culture. But the sprawling show develops a tight narrative around that idea and sticks with it, centering its offerings on Rockwell’s phenomenally popular “Four Freedoms” paintings and following that up, exhaustively, with his later images propagating civil rights, human rights and global equity.
The argument is convincing and the lesson, told through hundreds of paintings, posters and other objects by Rockwell and his peers, is compelling. There’s much to like in “Imagining Freedom.”
Part of that comes from Rockwell’s signature sentimentality, his ability to draw up characters a viewer can’t help but love, and see their own community manifested in — the plucky kids, mischievous dogs and earnest laborers that appeared most-famously on the cover of the “Saturday Evening Post” from 1916 to 1963. There were more than 300 of covers at a time when the magazine’s circulation topped 4 million, and they made Rockwell a star.
