In the November issue of Vanity Fair, David Kamp turns in a very entertaining and informative piece on beloved American illustrator Norman Rockwell. The magazine’s editors chose the jarring and vaguely disquieting approach of displaying several iconic Rockwell paintings side-by-side with the photos from which the artist worked – some will see this as drastically, perhaps detrimentally demystifying the creative process (reducing it to a question of which nick-nacks Rockwell chose for the backgrounds, etc.), but the article’s real bone of contention comes from another kind of artistic demystification altogether. The question again arises about just how much of an influence Rockwell’s great predecessor J. C. Leyendecker had on the artist’s work – and how much of that influence was involuntary. Kamp writes that Laurence Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler, in their book on Leyendecker, “suggest that Rockwell had something of a Single White Female complex about the elder artist, moving near him, befriending him, pumping him for contacts in the biz … and ultimately supplant[ing] his idol as the best-known cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post.” Readers noting Schick’s tone of doubt are encouraged to read Steve Donoghue’s review of the Cutlers’ book in our December 2008 issue and perhaps decide for themselves…