Irving Norman
Irving Norman (January 10, 1906 in Vilnius as Irving Noachowitz - July 1989) was a Lithuanian-American draftsman, painter, and political activist whose expressionist and surrealist paintings critically reflect and condemn the horrors of totalitarianism in the 20th century.
Life[edit]
Irving Norman was born Irving Noachowitz on January 10, 1906 in Vilnius into a Jewish family. His multilingual hometown, which later became the capital of Lithuania, was then under Tsarist-Russian administration. As a child, Norman loved drawing and his talent caught the attention of an uncle who promised to send him to an art school. The outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution foiled these plans and instead Norman first learned the hairdressing trade.[1]
In 1923, at the age of 17, Norman immigrated to the United States to live with relatives in New York City. City life in the metropolis with its immigration hardship and social conflicts sharpened Norman's political and aesthetic awareness. He felt a caring responsibility for the poor and disenfranchised and became politically involved with the Young Communist League. In the 1920s he tried to overcome the causes and the burdens of the global economic crisis through solidarity campaigns and political education. In 1934 Norman left New York City and moved to Laguna Beach, California, where he co-owned a hair salon.
In the mid-1930s Norman felt the need to fight for his political ideas in a wider, international context. He volunteered with the American Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. As a member of Machine Gun Company XV, he spent 1938, the last tragic year of the Spanish Civil War, defending the Spanish Republic against the fascist troops of General Francisco Franco. The horrors Norman experienced that year shaped him for the rest of his life and were a catalyst that led him to look for a creative means of expression to criticise exploitation and trauma. After his return to America, Norman longed for peace and solitude and initially withdrew to the Californian island of Santa Catalina. In the city of Avalon he took part in drawing classes which rekindled his interest in the visual arts.[1]
Motivated by a growing self-confidence as an artist and the desire to further develop the technical possibilities of his drawing and painting, in 1940 Irving moved to San Francisco. He attended the San Francisco School of Fine Arts and studied with William Gaw and Spencer Macky. In 1942 Norman had his first solo exhibition with drawings. His first major overall exhibition with drawings and paintings in 1945 earned him critical acclaim and an Albert Bender Memorial Prize. With the associated prize money, he returned to New York City in 1946 to study with Reginald Marsh and Robert Beverly Hale in the Art Students League. In the same year, Norman traveled to Mexico to experience first-hand paintings that had been an important source of inspiration for him but which he only knew through photographic reproductions: the large murals by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siquerios.[1]
In 1954, Norman met the immigrant Hela Bohlen, who came from Germany. They married in January 1955. From the beginning of their marriage, Irving and Hela Norman, who was a talented photographer and landscape gardener,[2] had an agreement on the division of labor for earning money and the development of their respective artistic talents. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Norman made a name for himself on the American East Coast as an artist who managed to translate his political and social messages into technically sophisticated visual tableaus. His work, which combined social realism with surreal and constructivist elements, surprised and inspired artist friends, art critics and members of the socially aware public alike. However, commercial success and media attention largely escaped him. The art critic Alfred Frankenstein noted in a 1975 review of the San Francisco Chronicle, especially with regard to the political and artistic establishment, that Norman's art "scares people, especially museum directors.”[3] Because of his political and social engagement, Norman was under FBI surveillance for decades. From 1950s, in the wake of McCarthy's conspiracy theories and persecution of communists, his mail was monitored. The surveillance continued until 1974, despite the fact that he had brought successful legal action against the FBI's frequent interrogations and harassment with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.
In 1962, Irving and Hela Norman purchased a house in the remote coastal valley of Tunitas Creek, south of Half Moon Bay, California. For 27 years, Norman found the concentration he needed to paint there, and in his modest studio he created most of his large and highly complex canvases. During the breaks between creating sequences of work, Irving and Hela Norman went on trips in the USA and later overseas in order to familiarise themselves with and be inspired by contemporary works of art in modern art museums which Norman described as the 'cathedrals of modern everyday life'.[1] Regarding his artistic motivation and his wide-ranging reception of role models from art history, Norman said: “The (artistic) path I followed chose me, not me it, I was led to painting by experiencing life, its contemplation and a desperate need to give it expression. I find spiritual strength in artists of the remotest past to the immediate present.”[4] In the 1970s, public and art-historical awareness of Norman's work waned, but in 1984 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired his work ‘The Human Condition, Biennial III’, which represented a breakthrough into major international art collections of the modern era.[3] Norman died in California in July 1989.[1]
A resurgent interest in Norman's works manifested itself in several solo exhibitions around the turn of the 21th century, including a thematic retrospective at De Young in San Francisco in 1996 The Measure of all Things and the traveling exhibition Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman's Social Surrealism (2007-2008). In 2008, New York's Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presented a major overview of Norman’s works: War & Peace: Monumental Paintings, 1969–1986 (2014). A documentary film by Ray Day Truth be Told: Irving Norman and the Human Predicament, which was released in 2018, also contributed to the growing interest in Norman's life and work.[5]
Works[edit]
Norman worked in various media; he created oil and acrylic paintings on canvas as well as drawings and watercolours. Some of the drawings and watercolours served as templates for larger paintings, but mostly they are intended as independent works. Norman's works are characterised by sophisticated space and line compositions that suggest certain (interpretative) perspectives and (social) dynamics. The pictures in his middle and later period often huge gatherings of people, the individuals being subjected to industrial or military complexes. These crowds, which often show the effects of physical and/or psychological violence are portrayed with great meticulousness and, despite all stylisation, with great attention to detail. The frequently adopted ‘serial effect’ (series of commuters, workers, soldiers) exposes the loss of individuality and communal interaction in modern mass society.
Norman's oil paintings often show dystopian and dystopian science-fiction motifs. The depicted people are constrained in rigid architectural and institutional frameworks, in prison or camp-like rooms. Sometimes the faces retain individual features despite the levelling effects of the constraints. Norman's tableaus of marching soldiers, guards and functionaries who literally walk over corpses show them as robotic figures and murderous machines. In some works the bodies of soldiers are indistinguishable from their metallic weapons. In a number of Norman's pictures inscriptions are used which can be seen on buildings or mirror-inverted on window panes, but which cannot be clearly deciphered due to their unusual sequence of letters. Many of Norman's oil paintings employ an aggravated central perspectives but also cubist elements in order to depict uncanny public spaces and totalitarian ensembles that thwart any attempts of free interaction between individuals and groups. There are frequent allusion to modern infrastructure such as huge factory and laboratory buildings, armouries and highways. Many of his later pictures show clusters of organic structures (blood vessels, tubes, bubbles) which highlight the oppressive dimensions not only of totalitarian socio-economic, scientific and political systems but the biological and medical spheres as well.
Horizons and open skies are rarely visible in Norman’s paintings; the serial accumulation of artefacts and crowds that span the entire surface of the pictures create claustrophobic impressions and indicate no escape route or ways into the open. Occasionally, Norman connects his horror scenarios with (art-) historical discourses, especially with references to symbols from the passion of Christ (crosses, crucifixion groups) and modern totalitarianism (stylist fascist and capitalist symbols). This also applies to the titles of some works (e.g. 'Man of Sorrows', i.e. the suffering Christ), which evoke associations of well-known topoi of art history.
In addition to Mexican social realists, whose works Norman studied, there are also thematic and stylistic parallels to the works of European and Russian constructivists and expressionists such as Kasimir Malevich, George Grosz, Otto Dix and to art movements such as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and Fantastic Realism (e.g. Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer). Norman's unique fusion of styles is sometimes referred to as 'Social Surrealism'.[6]
Norman's drawings are mostly composed of fine lines and with a keen sense of lay-out. Like the large-format oil paintings, they often represent the endangerment of people by and within industrial and military complexes. Some are reminiscent of Goya’s drawings (‘The Disasters of War’). Other allude to M.C. Escher's 'impossible figures’ (e.g. beds floating in the shape of a spiral in the room in which amputees sleep and die), whereby the perplexing aspects of Norman’s images do not consist so much in their graphic arrangement and optical illusions but in the expression of sheer horror caused by modern war and dictatorship.
Norman's watercolours, some of which show similarities to William Blake's prophetic Illuminated Manuscripts, but also to Fritz Lang's film architecture (especially in Lang’s science fiction film Metropolis), are often very powerful and also critique the psychological and political dimensions of tyranny and modern totalitarianism.
Works (Selection)[edit]
- The City (City Rush) (ca. 1942)
- Armies 1 (1944)
- Great Orator (1944)
- Arrivals and Departures (1958)
- Blind Momentum (1960)
- American Street Scene (1961)
- War and Peace (1965–66)
- Rush Hour on the Corner of... (1977)
- Human Condition (1980)
Further Reading
Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman's Social Surrealism, Berkeley: Heyday 2006
ASIN : B01FGOZ9H8
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "About the Artist". Irving Norman Film. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
- ↑ "Hela Norman". Half Moon Bay Review. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Irving Norman". FAMSF Search the Collections. 2018-09-21. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
- ↑ "About". www.irvingnorman.com. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
- ↑ "Trailer". Irving Norman Film. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
- ↑ "Irving Norman". www.mutualart.com. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
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