Honoré Sharrer
Honoré Sharrer (1920–2009)
Nursery Rhyme, 1971
Oil on canvas, 49 x 89 in.
Signed (at upper left): Sharrer
RECORDED: Anastasia Kinigopoulo, “The Art of Honoré Sharrer,” in American Art Review 29 (January–February 2017), pp. 88, 89 illus. in color, 111
EXHIBITED: Spanierman Gallery, New York, April 18–May 11, 2002, Honoré Sharrer: Selected Paintings and Drawings, cover detail, no. 3, pp. 20–21 illus. in color // Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, February 2017–January 2018, A Dangerous Woman: Subversion and Surrealism in the Art of Honoré Sharrer, jacket detail, p. 113, pl. 15 illus. in color, p. 168 color photo of artist sitting on a table in front of picture // Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, April 25–June 7, 2019, Honoré Sharrer: Claws Sheathed in Velvet, no. 5, inside front and back covers, illus. in color
EX COLL.: the artist; to her estate, until the present
Nursery Rhyme revisits one of Sharrer’s favorite sources of imagery, the content of children’s nursery rhymes. It is the last of a trio of canvasses including Mother Goose (1960) and Margery Daw (1969). Marjory Daw contains some of the same objects as Nursery Rhyme, including a table fork, a dog, and a cigarette butt. The meaning of these objects, if, indeed, they do have meanings, however, varies from canvas to canvas. In 1999, Sharrer described her favorite painting subjects as “ordinary matters, ... then ... myths, including religious subjects ... and then nursery rhymes.” The most obvious reference in Nursery Rhymes is to the familiar “dish [that] ran way with the spoon,” except that in the present case, three spoons seem to be propelling a dish, while the familiar “little dog” faces away from the “sport” and does not seem in the least amused. This is classic Sharrer disjunction. The woman in this painting, a self-portrait of the artist as a maternal figure, is represented in close conversation with a man whose head consists of a bouquet of flowers. Wearing an attractive and thoroughly conventional white dress, she stands next to but looks past the floral-coiffed gentleman. Sharrer quoted liberally from art historical references. Her flower-topped male recalls the oeuvre of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593), a sixteenth century Milanese painter whose work was revisited in 1937 in the landmark exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. The elegance Sharrer suggests in the woman’s dress, the looking glass, the classic column on the left, and the grand-manner drapery in the background is gainsaid by the dangling fly paper on the right, with the speck of a fly, one presumes about to join the sticky mortuary. The drapery looks to be common bedlinen, certainly not velvet. Stubbed out cigarette butts rest on what appears to be some kind of counter. The human figures stand in a foreground space that suggests an indentation in the counter, the same space however, on which the dog rests its forepaws. An oddly positioned knife and three table forks reiterate the eating utensils theme. This is classic Sharrer subversion, the precise rendering of everyday household objects, the accessories of domestic life, set in a surreal context.
