Who is Norman Rockwell? And what does he mean to Lana Del Rey?
In ‘Venice Bitch’, Lana Del Rey name-checks American artist Norman Rockwell and warns us “nothing gold can stay”. In that one line, she cut to the heart of Rockwell’s art, which on the surface seemed to capture American suburbia at its most nuclear and idealised. The term “Rockwellian” itself refers to quaint, sentimental portrayals of 1950s life, but what he did most effectively was bottle a universal longing for stability, all by conceiving of a grand, golden era that never really existed.
The hidden darkness in his paintings likely drew Del Rey to his work because hers strikes a similar chord, a cocktail of Old Hollywood opulence, rural Americana, and heartbreak. Throughout historic periods of massive upheaval in the shape of the Great Depression, two World Wars, and a raging civil rights struggle, Rockwell’s paintings remained steadfast in their style – idyllic, family-based portraits of America.
On the 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Del Rey’s references to the painter transcend even the title – they’re in the cartoon text of the cover and the impossible blue of the sky – that impossible beauty on what is thematically a dark album, one charting heartbreak and lost hopes. On some of its darker influences, she told Billboard: “It was staggered with references from living in Hollywood and seeing so many things that didn’t look right to me, things that I never thought I’d have permission to talk about, because everyone knew and no one ever said anything.”
Throughout the album, echoes of old American classics weave their way through, too, from the Sublime cover that sampled Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ to the “crimson and clover” line, which references a mid-1960s Tommy James and the Shondells track. The nostalgia Del Rey creates wouldn’t exist without Rockwell’s own take on American life, right down to his take on the American dream, a tragic, almost mythic aim that also takes root in her lyrics.
Even Rockwell, who captured the most joyous moments of the ’50s with staggering detail, shared Del Rey’s longing for times gone by. But where he addressed this in his art, she sang with a lilted Hollywood whisper, recalling the era’s greatest starlets in the opulence of 2012’s Born To Die. “The ’20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we’re in now,” Rockwell once mused. “There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when America believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it.”
Del Rey’s obsessive preoccupation with an America of old is inherently Rockwellian because it recalls a time so aesthetically preened it’s often associated with the country at its greatest – where children were happy, fathers provided, and mothers were well-kept housewives. Del Rey takes his almost satirical take on these ideals, peels back the veneer enough to learn those housewives were all miserable and addicted to benzos – and still yearns for it anyway.