The Cosmos of Helen Lundeberg
Chicago-born Helen Lundeberg (24 June 1908 – 19 April 1999), a noted California artist, Surrealist, and Post Surrealist, moved to Pasadena, California, as a child. Academically gifted and an avid reader, Lundeberg initially wanted to be a writer, but her path changed when she started painting self-portraits, along with paintings of her sister and mother. In 1933, two years after her first group exhibition at San Diego’s Fine Arts Gallery, Lundeberg’s first solo show took place at the Stanley Rose Gallery in Los Angeles. This same year she married Lorser Feitelson, a professor and painter she had met at Pasadena’s Stickney Memorial Art School in 1930.
Lundeberg’s career saw her work evolve from the Subjective Classicism or Post Surrealism of the 1930s to geometric abstraction during the 1950s. She moved from “enigmas” — or landscapes — interiors, still-life planetary forms, and intuitive compositions of the 1950s and 1960s to a topographical and architectural focus during the 1980s.
In 1934, Lundeberg wrote the New Classicism manifesto, and with Feitelson founded Subjective Classicism (or New Classicism), which came to be known as Post Surrealism. Using her painting Plant and Animal Analogies (1934-35) as a case study, Post Surrealism represented ‘the first concentrated response in the US to European Surrealism’ and differed from the traditional movement in that it was not guided by dream imagery or directed by the unconscious.
Lundeberg meticulously planned every detail in her work and believed her artistically guided meditation revealed a deeper meaning. The Louis Stern Fine Art Gallery in Los Angeles, the exclusive representative of the Estate of Helen Lundeberg, noted in the press release of their recent exhibition Helen Lundeberg: Enigma of Reality, that ‘in a rejection of European Surrealism’s focus on dreams, automatism, and tapping into the unconscious, Post Surrealism’s mysterious imagery was deliberately organized to induce guided contemplation of ideas within the conscious mind.’
The exhibition at Louis Stern focused on Lundeberg’s work between the 1930s and 1950s (incidentally my favourite Lundeberg era) before she dedicated herself ‘fully to the hard-edge abstract approach that would characterize the majority of her career.’ In this period, Lundeberg’s ‘painterly works featured a recurring repertoire of inscrutable objects, cunning manipulation of perspective, and strategic subversion of expectation.’
Lundeberg’s paintings often focus on flora, fauna, and the cosmos. Women’s hands peel away veils to reveal the moon, the body and nature merge into one entity, planetary magic enters the domestic sphere, and plant life appears activated in the luna light. As the gallery noted, ‘of particular interest to Lundeberg were the recurrent cycles of birth, life, and death, the permeable borders between psychological and physical space, and the ambiguities of perception and reality.’
The work Lundeberg produced during the 1940s, with reoccurring motifs of hands, planets, landscapes, and tables, may draw comparisons to Remedios Varo's fantastic realms or the sprawling Arizona Plains Dorothea Tanning painted in Sedona. In her exhibition notes for the 2012 LACMA exhibition titled In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, Ilene Susan Fort stated that Lundeberg's work lacks ‘chimaera.’ Essentially, Lundeberg's method was systematic and structured. She didn't adhere to automatic drawing or emerging from the subconscious mind. ‘Instead, carefully planned subjects were used to guide the viewer through the painting, gradually revealing a deeper meaning,’ says Fort. ‘This method of working appealed to Lundeberg's highly intellectual sensibilities, and her engagement with surrealism is present, to varying degrees, in her work throughout the rest of her career.’
In 1941, Lundeberg painted the mural History of California. One of only three Southern Californian women artists making public art for the WPA (Works Progress Administration), her commission to paint at the Fullerton City Hall covered three walls and depicted such moments as the arrival of Spanish explorers to the rise of Hollywood.
Lundeberg moved towards geometric abstraction in the 1950s, creating further distance between herself and the earlier themes of her career and becoming one of the most prolific painters working in Southern California. She focused on abstraction during the 1960s and 1970s, making art that explored landscapes, interiors, still life, planetary forms and intuitive compositions. Lundeberg loved 15th Century Italian Classicists, and her work in the 1980s — influenced by topography and architectural elements — reflects work from this period.
Lundeberg's last known painting was 1990’s Two Mountains. She passed away at the age of 91 in 1999.
Just been catching up on your substack writing that I've had bookmarked for ages (if you see a flurry today!) . Didn't know much about Lundeberg's work - it's really beautiful. Thank you x