Halpern's look at the art of Rockwell is fascinating. As someone who has always appreciated Rockwell's story-telling and technical expertise, I was surprised by what Halpern was forcing me to look at for the first time ever. Halpern points out that there is no accident in an artist's choices and compositional decision-making. Whether Rockwell was making conscious or sub-conscious decisions in his in-frame arrangements may ultimately be beside the point. After reading Halpern's account, you may not look at a Rockwell's prints, calendars, or coffee mugs quite the same way again.
Halpern is successful in walking the line between pure academia and a book written for the masses. He also ends this volume nicely, pointing out those fine artists who have -- in one way or another -- carried on Rockwell's on-canvas story-telling.

While Norman Rockwell's paintings are generally seen as imagery of all-American virtues, values, individuals, and scenes, the John Hopkins English professor Halpern sees them as "more challenging and complex" than even the most sophisticated critics have imagined in the recent revival of interest in Rockwell; which revival has mostly reaffirmed the general regard of his paintings. Halpern looks to Rockwell's famous painting "Triple Self-Portrait" for indication--and in a way confession--that there was more to Rockwell's paintings than is realized from the first impressions of their imagery and recognition and often identification with their subjects. Rockwell's insistent, undying "jokey inventiveness," evidenced more directly in his autobiography "My Adventures as An Illustrator," is seen in the often overlooked details of his paintings. The woman in "Rosie the Riveter" celebrating American women's role in the war effort of WWII has Irish facial features which identify her with the ethnic and working classes, not the middle-class matrons, businessmen, and shop owners who see their mainstream, traditional values represented by Rockwell. Also, Rosie's muscular arms go against the typical image of women as slender and in need of male protection. Halpern similarly interprets details of other paintings to find symbols or intimations of homosexuality, voyeurism, and other sexually-laden topics. Halpern does not go so far as to make Rockwell out to be lascivious or meanly subversive. The author does, however, argue and abundantly demonstrate the point that Rockwell's paintings are more complex, more Freudian, than this painter openly admitted to and than nearly all viewers realize.