Norman Rockwell took on civil rights in his 1960s artwork. (AP)

No matter how much money Norman Rockwell made, he remained a modest man. How modest?

“In 1947 I wrote him a letter asking to buy one of his paintings,” says West Palm Beach resident and retired cartoonist Morris Weiss. “He charged me $150.”

All the qualities that made Rockwell the most beloved American artist of his time and beyond are now on view at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art in a major exhibition of his work, on loan from the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. Since it’s an unusually honest selection, it also shows his limitations.

There are 40 original paintings, a complete run of his 323 covers for the Saturday Evening Post — May 1916 to December 1963 — as well as a lot of working photographs that he made as guides for his paintings.

A serious immersion in Rockwell makes it clear that his secret was his accessibility, and his great skill was within a narrow range. It’s art as comfort food, concerned almost exclusively with home and hearth, and Rockwell’s ideas are stated broadly enough so that they can’t be misinterpreted — even the dullest onlooker will get the point because Rockwell was careful to deal with types that would scan.

“There is certainly nostalgia,” says museum director Irving Lippman, “but there are also moments that resonate with our lives.”

That’s because Rockwell concentrated on evergreen moments that transcend historical periods and changing times — homecomings, dinners, ritual greetings and leave-takings, communal optimism and support. There is joy and there is sadness, but there is never grief.

Rockwell is often lumped together with other celebratory talents such as director Frank Capra, but Capra had undercurrents of despair. Rockwell rarely goes that deep, but he does go too far. A Day in the Life of a Little Girl, from 1952, really is as corny as Rockwell is often accused of being. Every expression is clownishly overstated and completely unnatural.

But at his best, Rockwell could attain something very delicate, as in his lovely 1954 painting, Girl at Mirror, which shows a little girl with a movie magazine in her lap gazing in plaintive dismay at her own bony reflection in a mirror. It’s perfectly pitched, and doesn’t oversell itself.

Likewise, the exhibit showcases a glowering portrait of Dwight Eisenhower that the Post wouldn’t have dared to run on the cover, and another notably honest portrait that shows a distinctly calculating, appraising John F. Kennedy. And Rockwell’s famous Triple Self Portrait from 1959 shows that he was one of the few artists who could do satire without being mean.

Rockwell’s early paintings — the exhibit begins with two works from 1914, when he was only 20 years old — are monochromatic, and slightly awkward in their treatment of the human figure. His youthful idols were great illustrators like J.C. Leyendecker and Howard Pyle, and at this point he’s falling painfully short of their standard.

But by the mid to late ’20s, he’s found his legs; a circus painting called Checkers, from 1928, shows that he has mastered draftsmanship — he could really draw by this time — and achieves a beautiful play of light on the faces. Most importantly, he’s realized the importance of texture, of the value of accurately rendered surfaces.

Some of Rockwell’s later work reveals his limitations. A good liberal, Rockwell was outraged by the killings of the civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in 1964. He determined to make a painting that would do the scene justice and spent months working on it. But his style couldn’t expand to accommodate rage. Perhaps his ability to express his political views in his work came too late in his life — the Saturday Evening Post refused to picture blacks in anything but service positions.

In the great protest paintings — Guernica, Goya’s massacre — the rage and violence leap off the canvas, but Rockwell’s painting is too studied, partially because he used a photo of a priest comforting a man shot by South American police as a model, partially because he’s unsuccessfully trying to adopt an entirely different, much rougher style for this one work. Look magazine ended up using Rockwell’s rough sketch rather than the painting, and both are part of the Lauderdale exhibit.

Rockwell found a niche and filled it, but there were drawbacks. Because he didn’t paint beautiful women, as, for instance, James Montgomery Flagg or Howard Chandler Christy did, and because the Post was not the highest paying of the mass magazines, he never made as much money as many other artists. Comfortably off by the time he was middle-aged, he didn’t become truly wealthy until comparatively late in life, as his work became popular in reproductions. Likewise, because of his willingness to be typed, respect from his peers was a long time coming.

“I first met Rockwell when he came to talk at the Art Student’s League in New York,” remembers Morris Weiss. “It was 1940 and I was 25. He was very down to earth; nothing theatrical about him. He spoke as though he wasn’t important, the exact antithesis of Flagg.

“He felt he was very lucky to be where he was. He told us that if we wanted to be in museums, we could not be illustrators in magazines, but if we wanted to make money, we needed to be illustrators.

“In all my conversations with him later on, he was always concerned that he got the painting right. And you can see that in his finished paintings. Leyendecker attacked a canvas like he owned it, but Rockwell was tentative with the canvas. He had a much gentler approach.”

The art world’s indifference to Rockwell, his categorization as an illustrator, was fine with him. “He thought being an illustrator was a noble profession, with a long lineage,” says Laurie Norton Moffatt, director of the Rockwell Museum. “What bothered him was the downgrading of the profession.”

The National Academy of Art never let him in because they didn’t consider him an artist. “To them, his paintings were worthless,” says Weiss. “He sold me a major painting for $150 — Music Hath Charms. Another painting he sold me was The Sheriff. Those paintings (which Weiss no longer owns) would bring five to 10 million today. If he knew the prices his paintings would bring, he’d be absolutely amazed.”

Rockwell died in 1978 at the age of 84. Nobody has replaced him, and nobody is likely to, because art has become more about unanswered questions than answered ones.

Like Irving Berlin, he was an American who became Americana.

‘American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell’
Through Feb. 7 at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art Fort,1 E. Las Olas Blvd. at Andrews Avenue. Information: (954) 525-5500.