Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism

“Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism” is a magnificent new book featuring the life and works of the Bay Area social surrealist painter Irving Norman. It was published by Heyday Books in September 2006 and is currently available for purchase through Amazon.com, Last Gasp and many local and regional bookstores.

This beautiful book contains many amazing reproductions of Irving’s paintings and early drawings, along with biographical information and essays about his groundbreaking work. It was produced in conjunction with the recent Irving Norman Retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, along with the Irving Norman trust, which is maintained by Irving’s wife Hela Norman. The book was edited by documentary filmmaker Ray Day and Scott A. Shields, chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum.

An émigré from Poland who survived World War I as a child and witnessed atrocities as a machine gunner in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, Irving Norman (1906–1989) painted with a dark vision at once personal and prophetic. Writing in Art in America ( July 2003) 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. Dark Metropolis, a book of compelling vision, is being produced in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento to accompany an ambitious retrospective of the art of this important painter. From there the show will travel to the Pasadena Museum of California Art and to the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University in Logan, Utah.An émigré from Poland who survived World War I as a child and witnessed atrocities as a machine gunner in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, Irving Norman (1906–1989) painted with a dark vision at once personal and prophetic. Writing in Art in America ( July 2003) 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. Dark Metropolis, a book of compelling vision, is being produced in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento to accompany an ambitious retrospective of the art of this important painter. From there the show will travel to the Pasadena Museum of California Art and to the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University in Logan, Utah.