I.

I  just went to take a picture of the de­tachable penis. Several factors motivated me. I’ll explain.

II.

It’s well-known that Mark David Chap­man carried a copy of The Catcher in the Rye on the night he murdered John Lennon. Richard Halpern, in his sharp new study, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence (University of Chicago Press), re­minds us of another, even weirder pop culture connection—one that literally brought Chapman to New York and infamy. To pay for the death trip (and the fatal firearm), “Chapman sold his beloved lithograph of Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait for $7,500.” “I find it suggestive that one icon of innocence was used to fund the assassination of ­another,” Halpern writes.

A passionate Rockwell fan, Halpern (a Shakespeare scholar by trade) suggests that “under the guise of innocence,” the paintings “often present potentially disturbing materials that they then dare the viewer to see and recognize.” In other words, sex is everywhere. The sanitized, sentimental scenes—a description critics and partisans can agree on—reveal darker material under this close reading. (Biographer Laura Claridge has noted that Rockwell, once a patient of Erik Erikson’s, “had al­ways developed his narrative line through… an almost classical, psychoanalytically oriented process of free association.”) Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter sports a strap-on. Christmas heralds sexual awakening. Dolls are disturbingly spread-eagled. In a dazzling deconstruction of 1955’s Art Critic (in which a snooty young painter stands before the portrait of an ample woman, peering at a piece of jewelry), Halpern not only highlights the real-life Oedipal tensions present (Rockwell’s wife Mary posed as the painted lady, and his son Jarvis, an aspiring artist, stood in as the museumgoer), but also compares the effete connoisseur’s hunched pose to that of Ingres’s famous Oedipus and the Sphinx.

III.

On a block of the Upper West Side, not far from the Hotel des Artistes, where Rockwell briefly lived (itself a little south of Lennon’s home, the Dakota), a fancy retail-condo building is going up. Over the summer, the boards surrounding the site bore a mural depicting what the shiny new block would look like, with tiny photo-realistic New Yorkers strolling around an antiseptically lit stretch of sidewalk. The first time
I saw it, pen-wielding wags had already struck. Energized by reading British graf god Banksy’s recent volume, Wall and Piece (Century), I took a closer look. The little people were saying things like, “I’m glad they tore down the florist’s to put up a new BANK!” and “Bank bank bank.” (The Upper West Side’s high rents have stimu­lated a surfeit of new bank branches.) Another artist had drawn crude, disembodied male members floating around...