Honoré Desmond Sharrer

Who was Honoré Desmond Sharrer?

Honoré Desmond Sharrer was an American artist. She first received public acclaim in 1950 for her painting Tribute to the American Working People, a five-image polyptych conceived in the form of a Renaissance altarpiece, except that its central figure is a factory worker and not a saint. Flanking this central figure are smaller scenes of ordinary people—at a picnic, in a parlor, on a farm and in the schoolroom. Meticulously painted in oil on composition board in a style and color palette reminiscent of the Flemish masters, the finished work is more than six feet long and three feet high and took her five years to complete. It was the subject of a 2007 retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

She first received public notice when her work Workers and Paintings was included in the legendary 1946 "Fourteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Dorothy Canning Miller. This show featured a selection of up and coming artists including Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, and Saul Steinberg. The "Fourteen Americans" show at MOMA, while often thought to proclaim the arrival of abstract expressionism did not do so unambiguously since it included those like Sharrer and George Tooker who are not modernists based on the litmus test of abstraction.