Honoré Sharrer (1920–2009)

HONORÉ SHARRER (1920–2009)
Painted Smiles, 1988
Oil on canvas, 17 x 15 in.
Signed (at lower right): Sharrer

EXHIBITED: Spanierman Gallery, New York, April 18–May 11, 2002, Honoré Sharrer: Selected Paintings and Drawings // Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, April 25–June 7, 2019, Honoré Sharrer: Claws Sheathed in Velvet, p. 12 plate 11 illus. in color, no. 14

EX COLL.: the artist; to her estate, until the present

Painted Smiles visits a favorite preoccupation of Sharrer and Zagorin: flamenco. Flamenco is a rhythmic expression in music and dance native to Andalusia in the southern part of Spain. Perez Zagorin relates the presence of music in general and flamenco music in particular in Sharrer’s life:

She listened always to the radio. Working here, she’d have her boom box. She loved flamenco music. We did a lot of—we were very interested in flamenco things, and we followed them. We hunted them up in Spain when we were there because they bastardized, pulverized—pure flamenco isn’t that easy to see any longer, but we have —right there, there are a number of flamenco records that she would play over and over.  

Painted Smiles is a flamenco-themed picture. The dancer, nude, holds her tambourine aloft with her left arm, while with her right hand she snaps her fingers. Sharrer has resisted the temptation to paint the traditional vividly-colored extravagantly-ruffled dress that this dancer should have worn. The only concession to the “flamenco”outfit here are the golden t-strap shoes. According to Sharrer scholar Melissa Wolfe, “Sharrer wrote on the label of Painted Smiles that it was the title of a song.” There is an Isley Brothers song from 1969 called “Behind a Painted Smile,” that Sharrer might have referenced. A song of unrequited love, the singer vows to hide his tears “behind a painted smile.” If unrequited love was not a compelling theme in Sharrer’s own life, the phrase “painted smile,” could easily have resonated with her agenda. “My life’s a masquerade / A world of let’s pretend / .... Pretending never ends. You can’t imagine the tears and sorrow / Behind a painted smile.” An added irony, and a general characteristic of Sharrer’s work is that her painted figures do not smile much. Painted Smile shows a dancer and a musician, the seated guitarist on the left side of the canvas. Both appear, by their serious and rapt expressions, to be entirely engrossed in their performance, pursuing their art individually and as a duet. The viewer is an observer here, as in many of Sharrer’s paintings, nearly in the picture plane, but clearly an eavesdropper behind an invisible barrier. The title of the painting underlines that separation. Despite the presence of Sharrer’s faithfully realized objects, we know that this is not reality, but an amalgam of the familiar and the disjunctive that makes us look differently at the familiar experiences and familiar objects whose meanings we assume, without further examination, that we understand.