Dark Metropolis   Irving Norman's Social Surrealism

Crocker Art Museum and the Irving Norman Trust

Edited by Ray Day and Scott A. Shields

 

223 pages (12 x 9 inches), with 154 color plates

With essays by Michael Duncan, Charles C. Eldredge, Patricia Junker

and Scott A. Shields

 

An émégre from Russian held Vilnius, Lithuania who survived World War 1 as a child and witnessed the atrocities as a machine gunner for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, Irving Norman (1906-1989) painted with a dark vision at once personal and prophetic. Writing in Art in America, Michael Duncan described his paintings as "jaw-droppingly effective social indictments that would have been endorsed by Orwell and Huxley. The unrestrained passion and monumental energy of this work blows most contemporary political art out of the water."

 

Norman's massive canvases abound with teeming figures, drone-like and mechanical in their repetition, yet stubbornly and hauntingly human. The combination of jewel-tone colors, transcendent messages, and technical virtuosity make his work unique in the history of American Art.

 

 

For more information contact Ray Day (415) 730 - 3670 or rayday2010@gmail.com