8 works online
Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Honoré Desmond Sharrer (July 12, 1920 – April 17, 2009) was an American artist. She first received public acclaim in 1950 for her painting Tribute to the American Working People, a five-image polyptych conceived in the form of a Renaissance altarpiece, except that its central figure is a factory worker and not a saint. Flanking this central figure are smaller scenes of ordinary people—at a picnic, in a parlor, on a farm and in the schoolroom. Meticulously painted in oil on composition board in a style and color palette reminiscent of the Flemish Masters, the finished work is more than six feet long and three feet high and took her five years to complete. It was the subject of a 2007 retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.She first received public notice when her work Workers and Paintings (1943) was included in the legendary 1946 "Fourteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Dorothy Canning Miller. This show featured a selection of up and coming artists including Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi (sculpture), and Saul Steinberg. The "Fourteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art, while often thought to proclaim the arrival of abstract expressionism did not do so unambiguously since it included those like Sharrer and George Tooker who are not modernists based on the litmus test of abstraction.Sharrer and her painting Man at Fountain were featured in the March 20, 1950 issue of Life Magazine, in a cover story featuring "Nineteen Young American Artists." Unlike many of her New York contemporaries including Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Sharrer did not take the turn to abstract expressionism and continued to paint in a figurative and academic style, although the content of her work was often mordantly witty. The term Magic Realism applied to other American painters including Paul Cadmus and George Tooker is often used to describe her later work.
Wikidata
Q15442578
View or edit the full Wikipedia entry
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Nationality
American
Gender
Female
Roles
Artist, Painter
Names
Honoré Desmond Sharrer, Honore Desmond Sharrer, Honore Desmond Zagorin Sharrer, Honore Sharrer, Honoré Sharrer, Mrs. H. Desmond Sharrer
Ulan
500068215
View the full Getty record
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License
Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

All requests to license audio or video footage produced by MoMA should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills or motion picture footage from films in MoMA’s Film Collection cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For licensing motion picture film footage it is advised to apply directly to the copyright holders. For access to motion picture film stills please contact the Film Study Center. More information is also available about the film collection and the Circulating Film and Video Library.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication or moma.org, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].