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Irving Norman
Air Raid Shelter

1958-1977

About the Item

A painting by Irving Norman. "Air Raid Shelter" is a social surrealist painting, oil on canvas in a palette of dark hues of grays and reds by American artist Irving Norman. It is signed verso, "Air Raid Shelter I. Norman". The Lithuanian-American artist Irving Norman was a social surrealist who painted large-scale and highly detailed critiques of contemporary life with hopes that viewers would consider the consequences of their actions and change their behavior. Influenced by the dire conditions of the Great Depression, his massive canvases feature armies of clone-like figures behaving in the clockwork manner in which they have been programmed. He moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1934 before helping to defend the Spanish Republic from the fascist Franco dictatorship. He survived the Spanish Civil War and in 1939 settling on Catalina Island off the Southern California coast, where he began drawing and painting from the atrocities he had witnessed. In 1940, he moved to San Francisco and had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art two years later. He then traveled to Mexico City and saw the murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros before moving to New York City to studying at the Art Students League from 1946 to 1947. He returned to San Francisco in the late 1940s. In 1988, fire destroyed his home, studio, artwork, and personal papers. Provenance: Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento Exhibition: 2006 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento 2007 Pasadena Museum of California Art 2007 Utah State Univ. Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art 2007 American University Katzen Museum, Washington, D.C. Literature: Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman's Social Surrealism, ed. Scott A. Shields and Ray Day (Sacramento and Berkeley: The Crocker Art Museum and Heyday Books, 2006), pg. 123
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