CLICHÉS & PREJUDICES

NORMAN
ROCKWELL, “the
storyteller with a brush,”
painted 322 covers for
The Saturday Evening
Post, from 1916 to 1963.
Rockwell wanted to
create iconic American
images and thrived on
sentimentality. He filled
each picture with an
abundance of details,
each one serving to
reiterate the same story
as the picture as a whole. Using the perspective and the
cropping of photographs, Rockwell placed the viewer in
the space described by his picture: In Saying Grace, 1951,
the Post readers’ favorite cover of all time (top, right), we are
seated at the next table, looking at the woman and young
boy praying. It’s their obliviousness to everyone around
them that tells how absorbed they are in prayer. In his
version of Saying Grace, Barry Blitt tried equating Islamic
with Christian piety (above) by changing the protagonists’
garb. Rockwell’s Freedom from Want (bottom, right), which
was used as propaganda in 1943 to sell War Bonds, beckons
us into a scene that, thanks to its snapshot cropping, well
illustrates the claustrophobia of a family Thanksgiving. Art
Spiegelman repainted it in a sketch in the fall of 2001 (opposite),
a time of sporadic attacks on American Muslim families. The
sketch was accepted, but reports that the United States was,
to the confusion of local kids, dropping both cluster bombs
and care packages in Afghanistan led Spiegelman to choose
to commemorate that event instead (below).

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