Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective

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 Lundeberg's 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.

About the Author :
Michael Duncan, a critic and independent curator, is a Corresponding Editor for Art in America. His writings have focused on maverick artists of the twentieth century, West Coast modernism, twentieth century figuration, and contemporary California art. His curatorial projects include surveys and recontextualizations of works by Pavel Tchelitchew, Sister Corita Kent, Kim MacConnel, Eugene Berman, Richard Pettibone, and Wallace Berman. He was the curator of the 2009 Texas Biennial and is curator of the forthcoming exhibitions LA RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945-1980. Malcolm Warner is an English art historian and curator who lives in the United States. Warner is now the Director of the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California, and was previously the Deputy Director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas from 2007-2012, having held his position as senior curator since 2002. Previous positions include research curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, curator of European art at the San Diego Museum of Art and senior curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art. He received his Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, Ilene Susan Fort is the Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art at LACMA, and has been with the museum since 1983. A leading scholar in her field, Dr. Fort has organized landmark exhibitions and published numerous articles, catalogues, and books. At LACMA, she curated and wrote the accompanying catalogues for "The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam" (1986); " American Paintings in Southern California Collections" (1996); "Made in California" (with Stephanie Barron and Sheri Bernstein) (2000-2001); "Manly Pursuit: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins" (2010); and most recently "In Wonderland".