Helen Lundeberg
1908–1999
To accompany an exhibition of their paintings in 1934, Helen Lundeberg and her teacher (and later husband) Lorser Feitelson 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.
In Planets, 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 PLANETS 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 The Red Planet 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.
Introduction
Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999) was an American painter. Along with her husband Lorser Feitelson, she is credited with establishing the Post-Surrealist movement. Her artistic style changed over the course of her career, and has been described variously as Post-Surrealism, Hard-edge painting and Subjective Classicism.
Wikidata identifier
Q13560737
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 27, 2025.
Introduction
Lundeberg co-founded the Post-Surrealism movement in 1933. She worked with the Federal Arts Project in the mural and print divisions from 1936 to 1942.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, muralist, painter
ULAN identifier
500004061
Names
Helen Lundeberg, Helen Lundeberg Feitelson, Mrs. Lorser Feitelson
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 27, 2025.
