Helen Lundeberg

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.

The exhibition follows upon an upswing in Lundeberg’s reputation. She is the subject of a substantial monograph by Suzanne Muchnic, published in 2014, and has been included in some recent international exhibitions—notably In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 2012-13. 

Exhbition overview from the museum website

Whether you go or not: the fully-illustrated exhibition catalog Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective surveys her career systematically, beginning with her landmark Post-Surrealist paintings of the 1930s, continuing through her simplified later style in which she preserved the enigmatic mood of her earlier, surrealistic imagery.

The Helen Lundeberg Catalogue Raisonné  Helen Lundeberg: Poetry Space Silence celebrates the accomplishment of Lundeberg's lengthy career. Featuring rarely seen vintage photographs along with extensive biographical information, the book chronicles the artist's evolution from art student to architect of the Post-Surrealist movement to Hard Edge master.