Art: Hard-Working Housewife

One of the most straightforward and unambiguous art exhibits in Manhattan last week occupied a table in an upstairs room of a 57th Street gallery. It was a polyptych of five small panels hinged together and somewhat pompously titled A Tribute to the American Working People. The four side panels represent a county fair, a parlor, a farm and a schoolroom, all crowded. The center panel portrays a workman with the expression of a weary Punch, standing before a green factory facade full of faces.

Pretty Honore Sharrer, 30, a Cambridge, Mass, housewife, spent five years and wore out roughly 225 tiny brushes on the job.

She thought little of devoting a whole day to dotting the right expression into an-eye only 1/16th of an inch in diameter, needed new glasses herself before she had done.

The 59 figures in the polyptych include witty to catty personifications of a multitude of U.S. types. Copied mostly from Sharrer's snapshots of real people, they have the flat, posed and curiously weightless quality that snapshots do. Sharrer arranged the figures in her pictures after drawing them all separately, admits it was a tedious problem to squeeze them into some sort of composition. The results are cluttered, and made more so by Sharrer's inability to put a sense of space into her backgrounds. Yet the golden 5 o'clock light, perhaps symbolic of quitting time, that floods the center panel is perfectly convincing, and all five panels sparkle with masterpieces of precise miniature art.

Despite its faults, the polyptych shows that Painter-Housewife Sharrer deserves a-place in the front rank of those U.S. artists who still put content first and paint it to look as real as possible.