An émigré from Poland who survived World War I as a child and witnessed atrocities as a machine gunner in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, Irving Norman (1906–1989) painted with a dark vision at once personal and prophetic. Writing in Art in America ( July 2003) Michael Duncan described his paintings as “jaw-droppingly effective social indictments that would have been endorsed by Orwell and Huxley. The unrestrained passion and monumental energy of this work blows most contemporary political art out of the water.”

Norman’s massive canvases abound with teeming figures, drone-like and mechanical in their repetition, yet stubbornly and hauntingly human.The combination of jewel-tone colors, transcendent messages, and technical virtuosity make his work unique in the history of American art. Dark Metropolis, a book of compelling vision, is being produced in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento to accompany an ambitious retrospective of the art of this important painter.