Norman Rockwell: His Family Speak Out

The Norman Rockwell Family Agency today addressed claims made by Deborah Solomon in her recently published book, American Mirror -- The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell in the following statement.

"In light of the false and unsubstantiated statements made by Deborah Solomon in her biography, American Mirror - The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, the Norman Rockwell Family Agency is compelled to make the following statement.

"Ms. Solomon's book does not give a scholarly or factual account of Norman Rockwell's life and work. Rather she concocts a fictionalized life. In doing so, she attempts to falsify all that the Family and the world know about him. In unfounded claims of homosexuality, Ms. Solomon obsessively attempts to demonstrate her "logical" evolution to pedophilia with not a shred of evidence apart from her unsupportable conjectures. She consistently pretends to know how Norman Rockwell "felt" and what "impulses" he harbored when there is no basis for such speculation, in her book or elsewhere..."

For the background to this divine feud see the New York Times.

In the book, Ms. Solomon raises the question of whether Rockwell was gay, writing that he “demonstrated an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men,” and that his marriages may have been a strategy for “controlling his homoerotic desires.” She described a camping trip in Quebec that Rockwell took with his male assistant, during which the men swam and played cards together late into the night, and Rockwell noted in his diaries that his assistant looked “most fetching in his long flannels.” There is nothing, Ms. Solomon cautioned in the book, “to suggest that he had sex with men.”