HONORé SHARRER (1920–2009)

Honoré Sharrer, an American artist whose realist paintings documented the daily experiences of ordinary working people, died in Washington on April 17, reports the New York Times‘s Margalit Fox. “In an era in which many of her contemporaries had begun to explore Abstract Expressionism, Sharrer remained committed to figurative art as a powerful vehicle for social criticism,” writes Fox.

Tribute to the American Working People, perhaps Sharrer’s best-known painting, is a five-image polyptych that recalls a medieval or Renaissance altarpiece. Its central figure, a factory worker, is flanked by smaller scenes of ordinary people at a picnic, in a parlor, on a farm, and in a schoolroom. The work, which took five years to paint, was unveiled in 1951 at Sharrer’s first solo show at Knoedler Gallery. It is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution and was the subject of an exhibition there in 2007 devoted exclusively to it. Titled “Anatomy of a Painting: Honoré Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People,” the exhibition featured much of Sharrer’s source material, including Farm Security Administration photographs from the late 1930s. Sharrer’s work is also in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.