Honoré Sharrer, a Realist Painter, Dies at 88

Honoré Sharrer, a noted American artist of the 1940s and afterward whose bold, witty, incisive paintings documented the daily experiences of ordinary working people, died in Washington on April 17. She was 88 and had lived in Charlottesville, Va., for many years.

In an era in which many of her contemporaries had begun to explore Abstract Expressionism, Ms. Sharrer remained committed to figurative art as a powerful vehicle for social criticism. Known for their jewel-like colors and painstaking attention to detail, her paintings were purposely flat, hyperrealistic and strongly narrative in their depiction of everyday life. Her visual style seemed to embrace the old masters and the Ashcan school in equal measure; in later years, it also incorporated a dash of deliberate strangeness that some critics described as magic realism.
Ms. Sharrer’s masterwork, critics widely agree, is her painting “Tribute to the American Working People.” A five-image polyptych that recalls a medieval or Renaissance altarpiece, it is more than two yards long and a yard high and took five years to paint. Its central figure, a factory worker, is flanked by smaller scenes of ordinary people at a picnic, in a parlor, on a farm and in a schoolroom.

Completed in 1951, the painting was unveiled that year at Ms. Sharrer’s first solo exhibition, at the Knoedler Galleries in New York. Reviewing the exhibition in The New York Times, Stuart Preston called “Tribute” “a notable contemporary American painting” and “a bold, frank and fine achievement.”