Biography

For more than forty years, Irving Norman quietly painted hundreds of monumental canvases with highly complex narratives that confront the universal horrors of war and what he believed to be the culprit: corporate capitalism. Norman’s highly detailed, representational paintings were superbly executed and finely crafted, but were for many years marginalized by an art world that remained fixated on the cool detachment of abstract formalism. Nevertheless, Norman remained steadfastly committed to documenting the dark side of the human condition, and his haunting critiques of American society continue to have relevance today.

Norman was born to Jewish parents as Irving Noachowitz in Vilna, Poland, in 1906, which was then under Russian control. He emigrated to New York in 1923 and made his first visit to California five years later. In 1935, Norman moved to Los Angeles, eventually settling in Laguna Beach, where he supported himself as a barber. An active participant in the left-wing movement, Norman volunteered to serve in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which fought to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascist Franco regime in 1938. This experience changed his world-view profoundly and he returned from the war committed to becoming an artist. In 1940, Norman moved to San Francisco and enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and studied with painters Spencer Macky and William Gaw. He continued his studies at the New York Art Students League in 1946, where he encountered the hyperrealistic fantasy paintings of Peter Blume. Later that year he traveled to Mexico to view the murals of Mexican social realists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose political commitment he fervently admired.

More important than this training, however, were the lessons of the battlefield that sustained him as an artist. Norman’s experiences as a machine gunner in Spain convinced him that “… society is based on war,” and powerfully affected his future artistic endeavors, particularly his desire to paint “… the violence of war.”1 Many of Norman’s completed paintings depict masses of men and women in the midst of passionate hostilities that occur when life becomes unbearable. For example, Norman painted Rebellions and Revolutions in 1970 during the height of the Vietnam War. The dramatic scene recognizes the horrible human suffering and cruelty that frequently calls forth violent public protest. In this case, the outcome of the demonstration appears bleak. While magnificent flames erupt in the background, a surging mass of marching protesters with faces painted as spears is dwarfed by an industrial structure fortified not only with massive military armaments, but also hideous serpents spewing poisonous liquid. Hundreds of prisoners peer forth from within the structure’s barred windows, and casualties of the rebellion hang from nooses affixed to the building’s exterior. A lifeless, outstretched corpse—perhaps referring to a martyred victim of the Kent State riot—is held aloft by four arms and linked to the banner of revolution by a system of blood vessels, while other flags bear the signs of war, hunger, human suffering, and desperation. The surreal gathering of human bodies calls to mind the unimaginable suffering endured during the mass executions of World War II, as well as the oppressive activities of contemporary regimes that continue to flourish around the world.

Norman’s heartfelt compassion for those afflicted by intolerable suffering extended beyond the realm of war to address what he saw as the inhumane conditions under which people are forced to labor in the name of industrial capitalism. In Awakening of the City, Norman packs thousands of bustling human figures into towering skyscrapers and onto congested freeway overpasses, conveying the frantic pace of a typical day in a major American city. The cars are distinguished by inset wheels that restrict easy mobility—these cars can only move forward if they maintain a certain momentum. “All are trapped in the blind momentum of history,” Norman once lamented.2 In the skyscrapers, Norman fills office after office with workers that are “formed by the space … cramped and curled, unable to move in their too small rooms.”3 Meanwhile, outside, masses of bodies continue to stream into the towers that have been fused together into what appears as a giant industrial machine—devouring its human workers. Symbols of corporate culture, including neon signs, billboards, and the ever-present clock, clutter the congested cityscape.

Norman once proclaimed that “What determines our cities is just business. … Profits. There’s no human consideration at all.”4 According to curator Patricia Junker, “he blamed capitalism for the crowding and ugliness of American cities,” which he once described in an extended interview:

The slums in New York were built by the Astors because they owned most of the land on the lower east side, and they built apartments for the immigrants and gave them as little space as possible so they could get as much [as possible] out of it. And that goes for big office buildings, too—get as much space out of it as they can. … So, there was a need for cities, but not a need for this kind of city; especially with communication, you didn’t have to congest yourself like that. … With magnificent speed you can spread out; the country is big and beautiful. And they have to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate to get every penny they can out of the acre of foot of space. Profits … inhuman … inhuman.5

Norman realized long ago that capitalist greed threatened to undermine the foundations of American society. More than a decade after he painted Awakening of the City, terrorists attacked the skyscrapers of New York’s World Trade Center, which for many observers symbolized America’s capitalist prowess and unchecked economic progress. Like the contemporary German artist Andreas Gursky, whose photographs of vast office buildings and apartment complexes warn of the dehumanizing effects of globalized capital, Norman dared to offer an equally stern warning—many years before. —A.W.

1. Patricia Junker, “To Be Remembered: The Life and Career of Irving Norman,” The Measure of all Things, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), 19.
2. Irving Norman, letter to Norman Bell, 1985.
3. Norman, quoted in Junker, 15. This statement was actually made in reference to a very similar painting with towering skyscrapers, entitled War and Peace (1965–67).
4. Norman, quoted in Junker, 15.
5. Ibid.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


Born in Vilna, Russia in 1906, Norman emigrated to the United States in 1923 and settled in New York where he found work as a barber. He visited California for the first time in 1929 and eventually moved to Laguna Beach in 1934.  From 1938-39 he volunteered for service with other Americans in the Lincoln Brigade—part of an international effort to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascist Spanish regime. He moved to San Francisco in 1940 to attend the California School of Fine Arts where she studied with William Gaw and Spencer Macky. He subsequently studied at the Art Students’ League, New York in 1946 with Reginald Marsh before visiting Mexico to view murals by Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco. Norman died in 1989 while working in his studio. A retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in 1996. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; the Crocker Art Museum; and the Student Union at San Jose State University. These will be the first works by Norman to enter the SJMA Collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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