Honoré Desmond Sharrer

Honoré Desmond Sharrer (July 12, 1920 – April 17, 2009) was an American artist. She first expected public cheering 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 shadowy people—at a picnic, in a parlor, on a farm and in the schoolroom. Meticulously painted in oil upon composition board in a style and color palette reminiscent of the Flemish Masters, the finished law is greater than six feet long and three feet tall and took her five years to complete. It was the subject of a 2007 retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution and is share of the unshakable collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

She first traditional public notice past her work Workers and Paintings (1943) was included in the legendary 1946 "Fourteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Dorothy Canning Miller. This acquit yourself featured a selection of stirring and coming artists including Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi (sculpture), and Saul Steinberg. The "Fourteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art, while often thought to proclaim the beginning of abstract expressionism did not do consequently unambiguously since it included those with Sharrer and George Tooker who are not modernists based upon the litmus exam of abstraction.

Sharrer and her painting Man at Fountain were featured in the March 20, 1950 concern of Life Magazine, in a cover story featuring "Nineteen Young American Artists."

Unlike many of her New York contemporaries including Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Sharrer did not accept the perspective to abstract expressionism and continued to paint in a figurative and academic style, although the content of her perform was often mordantly witty. The term Magic Realism applied to further American painters including Paul Cadmus and George Tooker is often used to describe her difficult work.