"American Mirror," About Norman Rockwell, by Deborah Solomon In her engaging and ultimately sad biography of Norman Rockwell, Deborah Solomon fills in the partly known life of one of America's most famous and popular illustrator-artists. Because Rockwell has been well documented - from his own autobiography in 1960 to periodic monographs from art-book publishers in later decades - a skeptic might ask if a new accounting is needed. Well, no and yes. Arguing against another publication is the new research in more recent books. Notable have been the efforts by Karal Ann Marling and Robert Rosenblum, who attempted to modernize Rockwell, as others have Andrew Wyeth, by seeing abstraction in their work that correlates to aspects of Abstract Expressionism. When a retrospective that went to seven museums concluded at the Guggenheim in New York in 2002, the indefatigably imaginative Mr. Rosenblum liked to point out details in Rockwell paintings he could liken to Picasso and Cézanne. In his catalog essay, Mr. Rosenblum found the white wall surface in Rockwell's classic 1964 painting of Ruby Bridges being escorted to school evocative of Cy Twombly, and the "Girl at Mirror" a likely reference to Picasso's similar subject in the Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Solomon also notes that Rockwell undertook his own version of Pollock in "The Connoisseur," (1962). Her goal, however, is less to examine Rockwell's artistic place in 20th-century painting than to describe his idiosyncratic character and personality disorders. Other historians have noted Rockwell's borrowings from Michelangelo, Mondrian and Vermeer for a figural pose or an interior composition. His well-known "Triple Self Portrait" (1970), incorporates details from works by Rembrandt, Dürer, Picasso and van Gogh. Rockwell knew his art history from books, museum visits and trips abroad. More than borrowing from the old masters, he was sensitive to the artifices of pure design and perception. We see this in his numerous scenes of figures looking at pictures and of compositions showing paintings within paintings. The 1986 publication of a Rockwell catalogue raisonné and a current reprint of his 332 magazine covers provide a survey of his art. Contributing further attention is the auction this December of three major paintings, including "Saying Grace" (1951) and "The Gossips" (1948), prompting speculation of bidding at $15 million or more apiece. Thus we may feel his art is well recorded. But Ms. Solomon's book fully justifies a fresh look at his life. An art critic and author of biographies of Joseph Cornell and Jackson Pollock and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, she offers something new, entertaining and disturbing. Her challenge was to explain a life utterly different from Rockwell's humorous and optimistic paintings. She has told his story with a breadth of facts and narrative finesse. It is a revelation. Ms. Solomon writes in a breezy and conversational style (at one point referring to the Guggenheim Museum as "the Goog"), but this suits Rockwell's lighthearted visual storytelling. Likewise, her account takes shape through compact vignettes of people and events, appropriate to Rockwell's self-contained aphoristic depictions and often silhouetted figure groupings. She integrates into her story close readings of selected works. Concluding sentences to chapters are often pithy and memorable: "When his fellow Americans thought of Rockwell, they thought of the man they had seen in the newsreel: a friendly and relaxed Vermonter. They thought of someone he did not know. It is generally known that Rockwell played several sequential roles in choosing his subject matter: patriot, colonial revivalist, polemicist and political activist. Ms. Solomon spends little time placing Rockwell within the larger American culture. His ordinary themes and narrative content, for example, may be viewed as a legacy of 19th-century genre painting, exemplified by William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham. And while she notes that his youths have antecedents in Mark Twain's Huck Finn and friends, she doesn't connect his realism to the broader currents of American regionalism and scene painting from the 1920s to the "40s, with which we associate Wyeth, Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. She does, though, cite Rockwell's admitted indebtedness to the illustrator Howard Pyle. A more significant insight is her observation that with the waning of Abstract Expressionism's dominance, the emergence of Pop art and Photorealism in the "70s made possible a new surge of critical appreciation for Rockwell's art. Who knew that Andy Warhol bought two of his pictures and that Willem de Kooning professed admiration for his designs and textures? John Wilmerding's most recent book is "The Pop Object: The Still Life Tradition in Pop Art."