Dark Metropolis, Irving Norman's Social Surrealism

Originating at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento California, Dark Metropolis features an important painting from the NEHMA's permanent collection, Blind Momentum, by Irving Norman, 1960. This exhibition, curated by Scott A. Shields, Ph.D., Chief Curator at the Crocker Art Museum, consists of approximately 25 large-scale paintings by Norman along with 14 examples of the artist’s works on paper, and it is accompanied by a 228-page color catalogue. After debuting at the Crocker, this exhibit will show at the Pasadena Museum of California Art from January 26 through May 13, 2007 and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan, Utah from June 5 through October 6, 2007.

 

Unmasking the realities of human nature and the contemporary society in which we live, Irving Norman aimed only “to tell the truth of our time.” His highly detailed paintings are powerful critiques of modern life, painted in the hope of promoting change. The atrocities Norman witnessed in volunteer service during the Spanish Civil War jolted his consciousness, and he began to express his experiences through drawing and then painting from the 1940s to the 1980s. With the belief that his paintings could act as agents of social reform, Norman felt that pointing out the inequities, horrors and foibles of human behavior might somehow cause people to reconsider their actions. Most paintings were intended for public institutions, particularly museums, where the artist thought “all people could come and study them and contemplate.”