Displaying items by tag: deborah solomon

Deborah Solomon has been desperately trying to outrun the truth ever since American Mirror, her biography of my grandfather, Norman Rockwell, came out last November. But the truth is catching up with her.

Solomon's biography is one of the biggest non-fiction literary snow jobs in the last 50 years -- it makes the James Frey memoir debacle look like child's play. At least Frey took liberties by embellishing his own life, not defaming one of America's most beloved painters. Deborah Solomon doesn't just bend the truth, she breaks it. Many people are aware of the controversy, but few know and understand how Solomon has falsified almost every source she could get her hands on. This is not about differing opinions -- this is about an art critic who went out of her way to falsify, misquote, omit, distort and mischaracterize news stories, obituaries, my grandfather's autobiography (My Adventures As An Illustrator), his journal, my grandmother's letters, an insurance letter, a New Yorker article, and many other sources.

“Rockwell’s greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché.”

In that Washington Post criticism of a 2010 exhibition of Norman Rockwell paintings at the Smithsonian, Blake Gopnik joined a long line of prominent critics attacking Rockwell, the American artist and illustrator who depicted life in mid-20th-century America and died in 1978.

“Norman Rockwell was demonized by a generation of critics who not only saw him as an enemy of modern art, but of all art,” said Deborah Solomon, whose biography of Rockwell, “American Mirror,” was published last year. “He was seen as a lowly calendar artist whose work was unrelated to the lofty ambitions of art,” she said, or, as she put it in her book, “a cornball and a square.” The critical dismissal “was obviously a source of great pain throughout his life,” Ms. Solomon, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, added.