Untitled

Helen Lundeberg
Untitled
Acrylic on canvas, 1960
Gift of The Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation
2014.012

Helen Lundeberg was one of the most important California modernist painters of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, with her teacher and later husband Lorser Feitelson, she organized the first Surrealist movement in the United States and wrote its manifesto. By the late 1950s, she had simplified her style into large flat areas of color bordered by crisp edges. Though clearly a major force in the tendency toward hard-edge abstraction around 1960, she retained the enigmatic mood of her earlier, surrealist imagery, combining a sense of balance and order—she considered herself a Classicist—with intriguing effects of spatial ambiguity.