Helen Lundeberg (1908 – 1999)

Fruit and Leaves, 1951, oil on board, signed lower left, 6 x 8 inches, inscribed verso: “Lundeberg 1951 Fruit & Leaves Exhibited (Pasa, Art Inst., 1963 Pasadena Art Institute 1953 (by Helen Lundeberg Mrs. Lorser Feitleson)”, exhibited: [Solo Exhibition], Pasadena Art Institute, Pasadena, CA, November 22 to December 22, 1953; NB: the 1963 exhibition reference date verso is likely incorrect

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Helen Lundeberg was a leading California modernist, who is well regarded for her metaphysical, surrealist, post-surrealist, and hard-edge paintings, as well as WPA Era murals. A Chicago native, Lundeberg moved with her family to Pasadena, California at the age of four. Although a bright and capable student, Lundeberg’s future was uncertain at the beginning of the Great Depression, since her family struggled financially. She enrolled in Pasadena City College and then with support from a family friend, Helen Leddy, Lundeberg attended the nearby Stickney School of Art, where she met fellow artist, instructor and future husband, Lorser Feitelson.

By 1931, Lundeberg routinely entered juried exhibitions and in 1933 she had her first solo show at Los Angeles’ Stanley Rose Gallery. In 1934, Lundeberg and Feitelson founded the Post-Surrealist Movement with their manifesto entitled, New Classicism. During the 1930s and 1940s, Lundeberg exhibited extensively, including at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She worked for the WPA’s Federal Arts Project and completed six murals (either painted or mosaic) in Southern California.

Likely in reaction to the large scale of her public works murals, Lundeberg began creating small “postcard” paintings in 1942, often drawing on memory and imagination, rather than reality. These works often featured plants, flowers, trees and other organic subjects set against mysterious, abstracted and sometimes hard-edge backgrounds. Lundeberg reflected, “I don’t remember ever thinking about the possibility of being referential in some way. I might do what are called pure abstractions or non-objective works. [A]s far as 1951, when I painted Mirror No. 2 and a painting, a partner to it, The Shell . . . [t]he only forms there which are painted at all realistically are the little objects, the shell, the fruit. I forget what they all are. But the background, the areas which make a setting for these objects, are almost totally abstract . . . flat areas which suggest walls, cast shadows, even landscape and sky.” Fruit and Leaves is a prime example of Lundeberg’s observations from this period and exhibits the influence of surrealist artists, including Giorgio Morandi, who was exhibited in Los Angeles during the 1950s.

From the later 1950s onward, Lundeberg returned to larger scale paintings as her work became sparer and more edited, eventually tending towards hard edge abstraction, though she rarely abandoned completely references to landscape and architecture. Lundeberg was honored with many solo museum exhibitions, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Laguna Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Palms Springs Desert Museum. She is represented in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums and public collections, including the Museum of fine Arts Boston, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Sheldon Memorial Art Museum and Smithsonian American Art Museum.  Lundeberg is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.