Not a pretty picture

The horrors of war, the injustices of exploitation and the inhumanity of city life cover every square inch of Irving Norman's huge, detail-packed paintings and drawings, except for a few areas reserved for noble peasant folk and nude figures engaged in what would ordinarily be called the pleasures of the flesh. These sorry citizens are depicted with such vitriol that they come off as alienated automata, hollow shells consumed and dehumanized by carnal desires.

"Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman's Social Surrealism" paints a relentlessly grim picture of modern life. At the Pasadena Museum of California Art, its 21 paintings and 17 works on paper, made from 1941 to 1988, give graphic shape to society's ugly underbelly. A laundry list of social ills spills from Norman's labor-intensive illustrations, including toxic pollution, wage slavery, avaricious elites, schlock entertainment, hypocritical politicians, rampant unemployment, senseless wars, hopeless slums, conspicuous consumption, overcrowded streets, gross inequity and the psychological fallout of all of the above.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that Norman (1906-1989) is onto something -- that society is not all it's cracked up to be and that art might shed some light on its dark secrets.

You would, however, need to have your head stuck in sand if you were to discover anything new or learn anything specific about the evils of contemporary existence from Norman's images.

Not much changes, in terms of style or subject, from the earliest drawings to the more recent oils on canvas. Over the years, Norman's works get bigger, denser and more claustrophobic. But their style remains the same: All appear to be made by a fastidious comic-book artist with a work ethic matched only by his horror vacui and seething contempt for modernity. The same goes for the stories Norman's paintings tell, which become a generic litany of infamy:

Industrialists plot and scheme in dimly lighted rooms as factories fuel the engines of war. Peons are crammed into jail-like apartments. Victimized plebeians spill into the mean streets, where they are caught up like cogs in the daily grind, some thrust around on public transport and others doing solitary confinement in wedge-shaped automobiles.

Everyone hustles and bustles as if their lives depended on it, but the atmosphere is that of the living dead: zoned-out zombies sufficiently sensitive to know they are suffering but clueless as to why and powerless to do anything about it. If Jean-Paul Sartre designed purgatory, this is what it would look like.