HELEN LUNDEBERG: A RETROSPECTIVE

About this book

Laguna Art Museum is proud to organize the first comprehensive exhibition of the work of a key figure in twentieth-century California art Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999). Featuring approximately sixty to seventy paintings it will survey Lundebergs career systematically beginning with her landmark Post-Surrealist paintings of the 1930s. With her teacher and later husband Lorser Feitelson she organized the Post-Surrealist group the first of its kind in the United States and wrote its manifesto. Though exploring psychology and personal expression the Post-Surrealists aimed to bring a greater sense of order and control to European Surrealism and originally styled themselves New Classicists. By the late 1950s Lundeberg was working on a larger scale. She simplified her style into broad flat areas of color and though never a pure abstractionist played a key part in the "hard-edge" tendency in mid-century painting. Bringing de Chirico-like ambiguities of space to architectural and landscape compositions she preserved the enigmatic mood of her earlier surrealistic imagery.