Norman Rockwell update

Today's ArtDaily finally caught up with the sale of Norman Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties (1954) which sold for £7.9m ($15.4m) at a Sotheby’s New York auction last Thursday. For once, its blurb was worth waiting for: "The painting powerfully captures the generation gap between the Depression-era rancher and his wide-eyed college-bound son in an unforgettable image expressing the social and cultural growing pains of post-World War II America." Yes. Rockwell illustrated life. He did so with humour, wisdom, deep psychology, a deft folksy touch and a complete lack of pretence. For me, all this puts him among the genuinely great artists of the 20th century. But if you know nothing about art and you listen to pretentious, arrogant, Brit. Art Establishment twerps like Simon Schama, you'll end up believing that a third-rate hack like Picasso was a genius and that Norman Rockwell was a mere illustrator! (Very popular in the colonies, of course. What do they know about art?)