{"data":{"id":"812","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":812,"topgoose_id":1718,"tms_id":812,"display_name":"Helen Lundeberg","sort_name":"Lundeberg Helen","display_date":"1908–1999","begin_date":"1908","end_date":"1999","biography":"\u003cp\u003eTo accompany an exhibition of their paintings in 1934, Helen Lundeberg and her teacher (and later husband) \u003ca href=\"/artists/418\"\u003eLorser Feitelson\u003c/a\u003e published an artistic manifesto that called their style “Postsurrealism.” At a time when French Surrealist painters were gaining prominence in New York, Lundeberg’s paintings presented a different take on the movement. Like Surrealism, her paintings represented the inner workings of the mind through pictorial allegory, but instead of privileging the often-chaotic unconscious, she focused on the rational and scientific mind. With their poetic use of symbols, her paintings pose intellectual puzzles. The unexpected presence of flat, abstracted geometric forms within three-dimensional perspectival space lends her work a sense of visual mystery and a distinct style that would later garner the term “hard-edge” painting.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/4497\"\u003e\u003cem\u003ePlanets\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, a monochromatic print Lundeberg made under the auspices of the Federal Art Project, a circular table sits in the center of a room with a door open behind. A marble rests near the edge of the table, adjacent to a rounded doorknob, and together these spherical forms resemble celestial bodies in orbit. In the foreground an image of a comet is propped atop a stack of books, the word \u003cem\u003ePLANETS\u003c/em\u003e visible on the cover of the bottommost one. The stark contrast of light and dark turns swaths of illumination or shadow into spatial planes. This image is a mystical interplay between two- and three-dimensional space, abstraction, and representation. Evidently modeled after Lundeberg’s painting \u003cem\u003eThe Red Planet\u003c/em\u003e from 1934, the composition is nearly identical but is a mirror reflection, with the stack of books and door on opposite sides of the image.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500004061","wikidata_id":"Q13560737","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:36:22.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-29T07:00:51.264-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/812/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/812/exhibitions"}}}}