In 1977, San Francisco Chronicle art critic Alfred Frankenstein said of late artist Irving Norman: "He scares people . . . Norman's social criticism hits below the belt."
Two years earlier, the visionary artist, with characteristic candor, had already made his statement: "I don't pretend in my art . . . I try to go beyond illusion, to tell the truth. I go deep. I go high. I go wide. That doesn't always make me popular."
Indeed, despite an impressive list of solo and group exhibits, critical acclaim and popular enthusiasm, Norman's emotionally charged paintings received a chilly response from the modernism-oriented official art mainstream during his lifetime. At one point, his work may have made him the focus of an FBI investigation. But now, almost exactly seven years after Norman collapsed and died at age 83 while working in his Half Moon Bay studio, his art seems poised on the brink of the national recognition he never actively sought but remained confident would come. Its forerunner is "The Measure of All Things," a major exhibition of Norman's work at San Francisco's M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, showing through Oct. 20.
A guest book inside the gallery records viewers' comments. "Fantastic! Timely! Alarming!" writes one San Francisco viewer.
"Brilliant, powerful, overwhelming, anguished . . . a haunting vision," writes another.
Catalyzing that momentum is Norman's widow, Hela Norman, who, from the serenity of her rural Half Moon Bay home, has striven since her husband's death to bring his work into its own.
"After 40 years, it's like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill forever and ever," said Hela Norman, a gracious white-haired woman with a pixieish smile and musical German accent, who wed Irving in 1955. "I still can't believe it."
It has been a long time since the days when Norman's luminous watercolor "Big City" was banned in 1950 by then-de Young Museum Director Dr. Walter Heil for "obscenity" in its depiction of nude figures in the windows of a high-rise building. Now, museum-quiet, de Young's Gallery 27 is a fitting place to ponder and absorb Norman's work.
Museum Assistant Curator of American Paintings and exhibition organizer Patricia Junker hung 21 paintings created by Norman over 40 years. The works, on loan from Hela Norman, include 14 of Norman's trademark oversize canvases, any of which might have taken up to a year to complete.
All served as his medium for an uncompromising call for social reform.
The viewer sees faces first: peering bleakly from tiny windows in sleek high-rise buildings; roaring at each other on battlefields, hybrids of men and machine; crammed naked into gray-brown masses behind the self-satisfied privileged; or bound to cubicles, doing menial tasks. Each face wears its own palpably urgent expression. Buildings command attention next; with sharp weaponlike edges, they soar above mazes of highways choked with triangular vehicles jockeying for position.
Executed in vibrant color, the paintings blend staggering detail, geometric precision, aesthetic beauty and occasional whimsy. But out of that package, Norman's messages explode: the exploitation of the many by the few, the dehumanizing impact of the urban environment, and the ruthless consequences of capitalism and technology.
"(My subjects) always relate to the human figure, and how the human figure is related to the environment," Norman said in a documentary made about his life by Half Moon Bay filmmaker Susan Friedman (see sidebar). "The contemporary environment distorts the human figure and its potential for a healthier and longer life."
Another major theme in Norman's work grew out of a need to vent his outrage over his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, when the former barber served as a volunteer with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion defending the Spanish Republic against fascist forces. He returned from the war an altered man _ who eventually turned to art to channel his rage and reactions.
"(War) leaves powerful marks," Hela Norman noted, adding that her husband had once said, "It is the devastation of soul and Earth that is the only victor in war."
One entire wall of Gallery 27 is dedicated to Norman's 12- by 17-foot masterpiece, the meticulously detailed triptych War and Peace. Its central panel is dominated by two warriors standing toe to toe amidst human carnage. The left panel indicates that the engines of war are fueled by technology, with the furnaces of war depicted as human beings. The right panel explores human exploitation by big business, as lords of industry look down upon laboring men and women. The triptych was created between 1965 and 1967, first as a half-sized pencil drawing (now owned by musician Graham Nash) and then as an oil painting acquired by the de Young in January 1996.
"The foundation of this society is based on war," Norman said in 1983. "I had to find a way to express that thing . . . It's always covered up."
Apparently the FBI thought that perhaps Norman was also covering something up. During the war, Norman had been a member of the Young Communists League in New York; upon his return home, FBI agents began knocking at his door, showing Norman pictures of people and asking him if he knew them. By then, however, Norman had channeled his political verve into painting.
"He came to the conclusion that all sides were losers in war," said Hela Norman. "He freed himself."
It is not surprising then that while his art's graphic imagery and messages of social inequity form a nightmarish view, a perverse thread of hope underlies it all, according to his wife. The paintings have a vaguely devotional quality; War and Peace appears to be an altarpiece, and a tulip and a daisy are growing pointedly in the foreground.
"I do not think there are devils or angels in any camp," Norman said in 1985. "All are trapped in the blind momentum of history."
Hela insists her husband was, at heart, an optimist. "He had faith that we as human beings would be able to resolve our problems" and put that belief into his art, she said.
He had equal faith in the ability of the art world to accept his work, someday. To that end he worked incessantly, progressing from pencil drawings to adding bits of color to oil painting without concerning himself with recognition or financial security.
"He would say, `My function is to produce the work. Others will have to (market it,)' " Hela Norman said. "It would have taken him away from his work time."
Her work chronicling Irving's career began shortly before his death, when their home, set idyllically in the hills south of Half Moon Bay, to which they had moved in 1962, burned to the ground in 1988. The fire took 50 years of papers, drawings and paintings that were not stored elsewhere.
"All burned except our pajamas," recalled Hela, who believes that the loss contributed to her husband's death just a year later.
She undertook the work of piecing it all back together, drawing on newspapers, museums and friends for clippings of reviews. After Irving's death, she also rebuilt the house. In time, she began circulating word of the Norman collection to museums, seeking to preserve his work and bring it to the world's attention. Such a letter came to Dr. Steven Nash, chief curator of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in the summer of 1995. Nash and Junker accompanied Mrs. Norman to a South Bay self-storage locker to view the paintings, some of which were so large that they could not be leaned against the locker's wall. What they saw astounded them.
"There was a sense of, `How could he have slipped into obscurity?' " said Junker. "There was no question we wanted to do a show."
Junker believes that the de Young show will be a bellwether in the art world.
So does Hela Norman. She tends thriving flower gardens and blooming vines, enjoys part-time work at Coastside Books, and decorates her pleasant home with her husband's paintings, of which she is the steward. She remembers his death _ she heard the sound as he fell in his studio where he was painting a tribute to Beethoven, but, unwilling to disturb his work, did not investigate at once. In the following months, she had a recurring dream of that last painting, all in white tones. One night she dreamed of Irving, standing outside, also all in white, as if he'd just left the house. After that, the dream vanished.
"I woke up comforted," she said. "It resolved itself."
So, aparently, has her husband's standing in the art world.
"He'd love it," she said of the de Young showing. "He'd say, it should have happened long ago. He was totally secure in that knowledge."