#loser feitelson

HELEN LUNDEBERG (1908 - 1999) was a California-based painter affiliated with a series of small-bore local “movements,” including Subjective Classicism and Post-Surrealism. If these pre-packaged interpretive categories do not serve Lundeberg’s work well, Hard Edge Abstraction, the label routinely applied to her best work from the 1960s, completely traduces it, because Lundeberg, while hard-edged, was not an abstractionist.

Unlike her teacher and husband, Lorser Feitelson, Lundeberg never abjured figural or representational art. Instead, she  swore off the finely-delineated, anecdotal detail of her surrealist period, and, borrowed formal elements from abstract art–spare compositions, geometricizing forms, areas of uninflected color–to represent objects and spaces reduced to their essential forms. In that her art inhabits a space midway between representation and abstraction, Lundeberg owes something to Georgia O'Keeffe and Giorgio di Chirico. Her mastery of the decorative qualities of near-abstraction has brought her new success as the appeal of  "mid-century" modern continues to dominate popular design.

Lundeberg’s paintings are executed in a stony, block-y, impersonal style, yet they are regularly described by critics as “lyrical.” Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings were also said to be “lyrical,” a term whose appropriateness Frankenthaler questioned. Even though his compositions often consist of delicate, lace-like, skeins of paint, have titles like “Lavender Mist” and “Greyed Rainbow,"and appeared in Vogue magazine, Jackson Pollock is never referred to as a lyrical painter.

For what turned out to be their last studio album, Rather Ripped (Geffen, 2006), Sonic Youth recorded a song called "Helen Lundeberg,” the lyrics of which are excerpted from an exhibition catalogue of the artist’s works.