Norman Rockwell

Over the years Norman Rockwell has been warmly welcomed into the American home, first with his art on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, then with the trinkets and wall calendars and framed illustrations. Now there's furniture. And fabrics, accessories, lamps, custom window treatments and area rugs. The traditional American and country-style pieces inspired by the beloved illustrator are in the Saturday Evening Post-Norman Rockwell Home Furnishings Collection.

The man standing at Norman Johnson's door that cold January evening was a stranger who might have seemed vaguely familiar. Johnson, a retired high school instructor who taught English and coached tennis and football for 35 years in this unassuming town, probably didn't even have his door locked when he came to greet the bearded, gray-haired visitor. The man bluntly asked him, "Are you Norm Johnson?" When the 72-year-old Johnson didn't answer quickly enough, the man asked again.

Although I appreciated the article by Suzanne Muchnic on the rehabilitation of Norman Rockwell's reputation as a serious artist ("Rockwell Posts Some Gains With Critics," Oct. 28), I regret to say I find myself horrified at the prospect. Rockwell's work is a whitewashing of American life in more than one sense of the word, never hinting at the presence of racial conflict or economic inequality in the United States. One of the pictures reproduced with the article, "Freedom of Speech," almost perfectly reveals how profoundly reactionary, artistically and ideologically, Rockwell's "art" was. The work evidently depicts a worker being allowed to speak his piece at a town meeting, as a white patriarch regards him with approval.

It's been a mild winter in the Northeast so far and I, for one, don't like it. I miss those exciting blizzards that hit the region almost nonstop from Christmas to Presidents Day. I moved from Rome to New England in 2011, and everything was fine until early November when a man in a pickup stopped by my house to ask whether I wanted him to plow the drive. I must have looked blank, because his eyes narrowed and he said that it was going to be a long, hard winter. I told him no and closed the door, then got to thinking about winter.

I know right away, just in the way he begins, that Russ Anderson knows how to tell a story: "Years ago, before you were born . . . " he says, as if settling in to tell me a bedtime tale. And as we sit in his Santa Ana living room, Anderson, all arms and legs and 90 years old, tells how his acting career began in 1927 and how his classmates at the New York City drama school included people like Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Paul Muni. They became famous, but not him.

Despite 60 years of popularity, brilliant technique and an assured place among the great American illustrators, Norman Rockwell still doesn't get much respect as an artist. The painter may have dominated the cover of the Saturday Evening Post for decades, but he isn't even listed in many books on 20th-Century American art. On the other hand, not many other American artists, critically praised or not, ever get a TV show centered around their work.

For the first time since Americans drove Studebakers, smoked Chesterfields and wore Bulovas, the artist of the moment is Norman Rockwell. He was always the most stubbornly American artist of this American century. He was always the most popular with the hoi polloi. His pictures of apple-cheeked children, broad-shouldered soldiers and beatific Boy Scouts are embedded in the American subconscious, as familiar as Hopper's insomniacs and Warhol's recyclables.

Dawn in the Berkshires. Well, maybe more like 9-ish. A haunting riff from a distant flute drifts across the meadow, flutters tantalizingly through the pine boughs above my head, then before I can catch it is lost in a crescendo of horns and strings. A music student's dogged practice session has been momentarily eclipsed by a shirt-sleeve rehearsal of the entire Boston Symphony.

When this town's beloved shopping destination Marshall Field's was sold two years ago, its famous collection of holiday window decor and crates of Frango chocolate mints were left behind for the new owners. But Target Corp. seems to have packed up one Windy City souvenir before turning over the keys: an original Norman Rockwell painting of one of the great clocks on North State Street.

"How to Eat Fried Worms," the popular children's book by Thomas Rockwell that is now a New Line film, was rejected by 23 publishers before it found a home at Franklin Watts in 1973. As Rockwell explains it, back then a lot of people thought the subject matter was a little too disgusting. "Of course, that was a different time, now on television everyone's eating everything," he says. When Rockwell talks, one can almost hear his small-town roots.

On a warm Tuesday night, Covell, the new softly lit wine establishment in Los Feliz, enjoyed a healthy crowd, every seat at its jagged, 31-foot bar occupied by couples and small groups of friends chatting away between sips of offbeat, small-batch wines. No matter what adjectives — crisp, sweet, earthy or dry — get tossed at owner Dustin Lancaster, a longtime Café Stella bartender, or manager and wine director Matthew Kaner, a Silverlake Wine alum, they thrill at the challenge of finding the right wine.

Early on in Steven Spielberg's 1987 "Empire of the Sun," before the Japanese invasion of Shanghai shatters the privileged world of the movie's young British hero, we see the boy in the comfort of his own bedroom. In the dim room, the mother's face glows as she tucks her son into bed, while the father, reading glasses and newspaper in hand, walks into the room and for a moment leans over both of them. The scene looks as though it's straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. And it is just that, according to Spielberg.

Two hundred years ago, Dutch merchants opened shipments of porcelain from Japan to find the packing material was delicate rice paper, printed with brightly colored scenes of Japanese life. When the prints arrived, it didn't take long for some of the artists behind them to be recognized as masters. Mass-produced from carved woodblocks, the images were known as ukiyo-e . Today, the "images of the floating world" continue to be appreciated as more than so many little bits of paper.

Dear Amy: Well, it's Thanksgiving again, and I expect our family's celebration will be the usual stressful event where one or two people dominate the conversation, at least one person has too much to drink, people fight over politics, someone leaves the room in anger, and the people who have prepared the meal are exhausted and angry. Maybe I'm just venting, but I don't know if I can take it again. Any advice? Turkey Tired Dear Tired: Thanksgiving is only perfect in that famous Norman Rockwell rendition we all have seared in our memories.

More than 20 Norman Rockwell paintings belonging to Steven Spielberg have until next July to get ready for their close-up, which will come when they're hung in a special exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington -- along with more than 30 other Rockwells from the collection of his fellow filmmaker-to-the-masses, George Lucas. Then there's the one sitting in climate-controlled sequestration, somewhere in Las Vegas, and there's no telling when it'll be seen again.

ANN COULTER / AUTHOR OF "GUILTY: LIBERAL 'VICTIMS' AND THEIR ASSAULT ON AMERICA" I always wanted to run the NEA so I could fund only tacky bourgeois art, such as Precious Moments figurines, thimble collections, dogs playing poker, velvet Elvis paintings, "Scarface" mirrors from the gift shops by the beach, etc. I'd have a major retrospective on Norman Rockwell paintings and make Thomas Kinkade our painter laureate. My plan was to so enrage liberals and other half-brights with status anxiety that they would finally join with conservatives in demanding the abolition of that ridiculous agency.

The Coca-Cola Co. wants the real thing -- in this case, three rare Norman Rockwell paintings. The beverage company is searching for missing one-of-a-kind oil paintings that it commissioned from the Americana master more than 74 years ago. Each could be worth more than $500,000 if sold at auction. The paintings were among six works depicting children that Rockwell did for Coca-Cola's advertising campaigns of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In a treasure hunt that links popular Japanese culture to dark times in U.S.-Japan relations, a team of experts arrived in Los Angeles this week to search for paintings by Yumeji, one of Japan's most popular 20th-Century artists, who had a brief Southern California sojourn. The search for the lost works is a race against time: The last of the immigrants who knew of Yumeji and bought his art are dying, taking their secrets with them.

IN the first half of the 20th century, Joseph Christian (J.C.) Leyendecker was one of America's preeminent commercial illustrators; in fact, he was idolized by a young Norman Rockwell, who later befriended Leyendecker and lived not far from him in New Rochelle, N.Y. But while Rockwell's name became synonymous with the Saturday Evening Post and Americana in general, Leyendecker's name fell into relative obscurity. A traveling exhibition of more than 50 Leyendecker originals aims to change that.