Helen Lundeberg

Helen Lundeberg

Born: 1908

Died: 1999

Summary of Helen Lundeberg

When Helen Lundeberg began to paint, she was a profound thinker who also had a deep appreciation for art. All of nature, from the tiniest crustacean to the largest planet, was of interest to her, not just flowers or vegetables. It is true that Lundeberg’s canvases burst forth with great energy as she sought to investigate and understand all aspects of life. The two sides of her personality seemed to be at odds, but she was also a meticulous and methodical scientist, so what might appear to be a contradiction worked out perfectly.

Because of the length of her career and the fact that it spans nearly a century, she can be considered a milestone in the evolution of art from Surrealism to Post-Surrealism to abstraction. It’s true that Lundeberg incorporated elements from as far back as the Renaissance and as far forward as Early Surrealism. Because of her insatiable curiosity and penchant for fusing the natural world with the supernatural, her work resembles that of the Surrealists Ithell Colquhoun and Remedios Varo in many ways. A process that ideally leads to illumination and understanding is the goal of all of these artists’ pursuit of knowledge. After a long period of experimentation and experimentation, Lundeberg appears to have nailed it in her most recent works.

Lundeberg was both an artist and a thinker. Consequently, she played a crucial role in the founding of two relatively influential new art movements as a result of this combination. It was originally called ‘Subjective Classicism,’ but that name was later changed to ‘Post-Surrealism,’ and Lundeberg collaborated with Lorser Feitelson to write the manifesto for the movement. It was a new form of abstraction known as ‘Hard-edge Painting,’ and once again the couple was at the heart of its development.

Lundeberg and Feitelson’s relationship was both romantic and professional, as ‘artists in love.’ Lundeberg, like Dorothea Tanning and Georgia O’Keefe, was supported by her artistic spouse, Max Ernst and Alfred Stieglitz. Each of the three artists has remained childless, and each has created highly reflective visual spaces that allow for complex feelings related to childlessness to be addressed.

One gets the impression that Lundeberg’s influence bridges the continents of Europe and America. With an interest in early European Surrealists such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, as well as American desert landscapes and the same kind of insatiable curiosity that drove Straight Photographers such as Edward Weston, she took inspiration from these artists. Contrary to popular belief, Lundeberg established an American Surrealist identity while demonstrating that the most important themes in art are recurrent regardless of time or place.

The fact that Lundeberg is so enamoured with the planets and the cosmos shows just how much of a lifelong learner she is. There is a striking resemblance between Luneberg’s later depictions of planets and those of Yayoi Kusama from the 1950s and Ithell Colquhoun from the 1970s, both of whom painted similar globular and otherworldly spheres on black backgrounds.

Childhood

Helen Lundeberg was born in Chicago, but she lived most of her life in California after her family moved to Pasadena when she was four years old to accommodate her father’s job as a stock broker and real estate developer. Childhood car rides with her parents and younger sister, where she would gaze out the window at the California landscape, were some of her happiest times.

Lundeberg was an excellent student from an early age, and he was enrolled in a special programme for gifted kids. Her mother was ill, so she postponed enrolling in Pasadena Junior College for two years so she could be there to help out. She briefly considered becoming a writer while in college because she has always been a voracious reader. She honed her interest in astronomy and science in general as a result of her general thirst for knowledge. Furthermore, she would later incorporate some of these studies into her Post-Surrealist works, such as scientific diagrams she had drawn and diagrams she had made while taking certain courses.

Early Life

The beginning of Lundeberg’s formal training in art occurred in 1930. Stickney Memorial School of Art paid for her to attend a three-month course after a family friend recognised the girl’s artistic ability. This was the final straw for Lundeberg, who decided to finish her formal training in fine art at the same school where she had begun it. As a new art student, her first few weeks were anything but smooth. When artist Lorser Feitelson joined the teaching staff, he encouraged his students, including Lundeberg, to study the Old Masters and the Early Renaissance period. As Lundeberg put it, “when Lorser came and began to explain things, to make diagrams and to give us principles of different kinds of constructions – Wow, you know, light dawned!” Fifteen months after their first encounter together, the young artist had also fallen in love with Feitelson. During her time alone in the drawing studio, she was working on a composition for a drawing when her new teacher walked in to introduce himself. He then sat down next to her and proceeded to tell her everything she was doing wrong. Feitelson is credited by Lundeberg as the person who helped her realise that she was an artist. Unrelenting support and admiration from the beginning were his hallmarks.

Mid Life

As soon as she finished her degree, Lundeberg’s relationship with Feitelson went beyond that of a student teacher. Despite the fact that she was ten years her senior, and he was still married, she began seeing him romantically. After the death of Feitelson’s first wife in 1956, the state of California made it difficult to obtain a divorce. Lundeberg and Feitelson were finally able to tie the knot after more than two decades together.

Lundeberg and Feitelson’s professional artistic relationship was just as important as their love for each other. Art historian Diane D. Moran describes Lundeberg’s work as “…the first American response to European Surrealism, the key distinction between the Californians’ emphasis on the processes of the rational mind, as opposed to the Europeans’ stress on hallucinations and… the Europeans’ emphasis on hallucinations and… the European…

Lundeberg was also responsible for writing the 1934 manifesto, New Classicism (or Subjective Classicism), which outlined the philosophies of the movement and later became better known as Post-Surrealism as artists exhibited together under this style. Lundeberg wrote that “in New Classicism alone do we find an aesthetic that departs from the principles of the decorative graphic arts to found a unique order, and integrity of subject matter and pictorial structure unprecedented in the history of art.”

During the Great Depression, Lundeberg was hired to work on the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, which led to his departure from Post-Surrealism. Large-scale, realism-based murals made up the bulk of her time with this organisation. This is in stark contrast to earlier works in which she worked with a more abstract, Post-Surrealist style of art. In her new role as an employed artist, she was able to earn a living while still carving out time for her own creative pursuits on the weekends and in the evenings. She also had the opportunity to drive a five-ton truck for a mural project at the Fullerton, California City Hall while working for the WPA. Because the other two members of her crew did not possess valid driver’s licences, Lundeberg was tasked with operating the vehicle.

Lundeberg visited New York City for the first time in 1946. Feitelson accompanied the couple to museums and galleries, where they met other artists. Attending an evening party at Peggy Guggenheim’s house, Lundeberg was able to admire Jackson Pollock’s artwork. She, on the other hand, unlike many other artists of the time, had no desire to relocate to the city. “Relative isolation” in California suited her and Feitelson’s “loner personalities,” according to her own words. Often, she referred to herself and her partner, her husband, as a “group of two.”

Late Life

Feitelson influenced Lundeberg in the 1950s, when she began to focus on geometric shapes and simple block colours. This was a major shift in her career. Inspired by their own theories about “Hard-edge Painting,” they produced works that were far more abstract than previous ones. Regarding her beginnings in this aesthetic, she once said: “Two factors led to the creation of my debut album, which is hard-edge. The first thing that came to mind when I was thinking about the treatment of areas and spaces was this tendency that I already had, to suggest walls, floors, cast shadows, etc. I would also look at Lorser’s Magical Space Forms, in which these flat areas are ambiguously positive and negative, and be enthralled by the three-dimensional possibilities I saw in these flat areas. That was fine with me, but I wanted to put them to use for my own purposes.”

By the 1960s, Lundeberg’s work began to take on a more organic shape as she began to incorporate curving lines into her compositions. She used masking tape instead of a pencil to draw the lines in her paintings, which were frequently depicted as arches. It’s impossible to fiddle with a piece of tape while you’re applying it, she said. Hard-edge works of the 1970s by Lundeberg began to incorporate more architectural elements and landscapes. Giorgio de Chirico may have had an influence on this work, but it is interesting to note that the recurring arch formations are very similar to his work at this point.

Feitelson’s sudden death in 1978 was a devastating blow to Lundeberg, who had only recently been admitted to the hospital for an illness. He was always a “grand support and encourager” for Lundeberg, something she felt was rare and not always the case with male artists for their artist wives. Moran claims the following: “It’s hard not to feel a certain amount of emotional content in Lundeberg’s paintings from the years following this loss, given how strong and long their marriage was. As we have seen, this artist has insisted on the importance of content for her throughout her entire career, which makes it difficult to interpret her work in any other way.” For the most part, her later work has a much more subdued feel to it.

In the final years of her life, Lundeberg’s art and career received increased recognition, including numerous exhibitions and awards. A few years after saying, “As long as I can wiggle my brush,” Lundeberg continued to paint until 1990, when her health deteriorated so much that she couldn’t. In 1999, she succumbed to pneumonia and died.

For more than a century, Helen Lundeberg had a profound influence on American art. She was a key figure in the creation of two new and influential art movements, along with her husband and others. That which was the first to show that American artists could have a significant impact on the future direction of art was Post-Surrealism. Until this point in time, this kind of influence was largely reserved for Europeans. In addition to Philip Guston and Grace Clements, many other artists adopted a Post-Surrealist aesthetic. Even though the movement had a small following, it had a significant impact on the development of many important art movements, including Abstract Expressionism, which had a significant impact on other art movements as well.

“Hard-edge Painting” was perhaps Lundeberg’s most significant contribution to the art world. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko’s Color Field Painting movement was born out of the hard-edge movement’s interest in large blocks of flat colour and geometric abstraction. In particular, Lundeberg’s art helped to draw attention to California and to American artists outside of New York City’s borders, both practically and theoretically. A foundation is thus being laid for future generations of California artists, such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha as well as Mark Bradford and Bob Irwin. She was a person who helped put California on the map when people were not looking to the United States at all as an arts centre, and certainly not looking to California,” says Carol Eliel, a Los Angeles-based art curator.

Just as Georgia O’Keeffe’s work cleared the way for more subtle, lyrical, and yet somehow fleshy painting as it evolved into more confident abstraction while still holding on to a passion for representation. Yayoi Kusuma and Agnes Martin are among the artists who have been influenced by her work, which is linked to a younger generation of artists.

Famous Art by Helen Lundeberg

The Red Planet

1934

Helen Lundeberg The Red Planet (1934)

Small red coin rests on a round window in Lundeberg’s painting The Red Planet, an interior domestic scene. At the same time, the window appears to be a table and the “coin” floats in midair. Opened door or globe behind the window/table reveals a gold doorknob. An image of the night sky is propped up against a stack of books on the canvas on the floor next to the table. Immense pieces of the sky have been brought into our space, and they’ve been magically framed for our viewing pleasure.

Surrealist painting, one of Lundeberg’s early works, shows the influence of Salvador Dal in that here, like in many of Dali’s works, she has employed double images. The work also evokes early drawings by Max Ernst, who was fascinated by the design of magical apparatus, and anticipates the heavenly paintings of Remedios Varo. A coin and a doorknob may at first appear to be planets, but they could also be viewed as a coin or doorknob. Ilene Susan Fort, an art curator, says that these objects “appear to float in the air like orbs. Images in the painting and the book both reference Mars, a planet that is often referred to as “the red planet.””

Plant and Animal Analogies

1934-1935

Helen Lundeberg Plant and Animal Analogies (1934-35)

Helen Lundeberg depicts the complexity of the world around her, but she also appears to be trying to solve a scientific and spiritual conundrum in this piece. An image of a large tree with a woman and her small child standing next to it is featured in the background of Plant and Animal Analogies. A knife, cherries, a half-green pepper, and a dissected cross-sectional image of a brain are among the items in the foreground. The dissected half of a female uterus can be seen on the right, linked to the other images by white dashed lines. The painting’s overarching message is that there is a consistent pattern of design throughout the universe, which can be seen by paying attention to the details. Everything is intertwined and interdependent. This interconnectedness is not limited to the natural world, but extends as far as art history. Giorgio de Chirico was an early influence on Lundeberg, as evidenced by the flesh-colored torso of a female body resting in a window structure. Edward Weston’s series of close-up photographs of fruits and vegetables, also made in the early 1930s, has a similar message behind it. Like Ithell Colquhoun’s early work and Lundeberg, the most acute observation and deepest dissection of nature results in the dissolution of opposites and the merging of all things. “

Double Portrait of the Artist in Time

1935

Helen Lundeberg Double Portrait of the Artist in Time (1935)

There is a small child sitting at a desk, holding an unopened flower, and a clock on a blank sheet of paper. An elongated female figure casts a shadow on the wall behind her, partially covering a painting of a red-flower-holding woman at an open globe-shaped desk. Most people think of this painting as a retrospective self-portrait, which is exactly what the title suggests. Considering the artist’s own inability to have children, there is a strong sense of longing and loss in the depiction of an experience that will never be. When viewed in this light, the painting is eerily similar to Dorothea Tanning’s Maternity (1946), which depicts a similar scene of longing for a relationship that does not yet exist.

While Lundeberg was known for his self-portraits, this piece is notable because it features two images of the artist. Using a photograph of herself as a child and a painting of herself as an adult based on the 1934 painting Artist, Flowers, and Hemispheres, she cleverly depicts her life’s journey from childhood to adulthood. “The time on the clock represents the child’s age of two and a quarter, and the blank paper suggests her unknown future. She holds a flower bud to emphasise her undeveloped state, whereas the adult figure holds a blooming flower to show that she has experienced sex and love. Lundeberg connected the young girl to the grown woman with a shadow to suggest that…”

Microcosm and Macrocosm

1937

Helen Lundeberg Microcosm and Macrocosm (1937)

Microcosm and Macrocosm by Lundeberg features a small portion of a woman’s thoughtful face in the upper left corner. In the left centre of the canvas, her right hand can be seen holding a magnifying glass needed to examine microscopic forms within the red circles. These shapes appear to float against a watery landscape with fish swimming in the lower right corner of the painting. Saturn and a constellation of stars are also depicted in red circles in the night sky. As in Plant and Animal Analogies, we return to the idea that if we look at one small part of the universe in great detail, we may be able to gain a comprehensive understanding of the universe as a whole.

Looking Through

1964

Helen Lundeberg Looking Through (1964)

A recognisable landscape and blue sky can be seen through two archways carved into a black wall in this painting’s title, as shown in the image. Lundeberg’s refusal to render completely abstract works sets her apart from other artists working in the style of hard-edge painting, despite the use of sharp lines and clean, depthless colours. “I want both this interesting shape or assembly of shapes and whatever subjective impact the referential aspect has,” she said in explaining her reasoning for this. As a result, a landscape is created that always has some indication of human presence, no matter how ambiguous. This was also true of Kay Sage’s artwork. Sage’s physiological spaces are often characterised by a feeling of solitary confinement. Lundeberg’s images, though sparse in composition, feel lighter and more upbeat, perhaps because of her choice of colour palettes.

Planet No. 1

1965

Planet No. 1 1965

An enormous circle dominates the canvas of Planet No. 1 by Lundeberg, painted against a black background. Lines in orange and green form the top of the orb, while an abstract shape is rendered in pastel shades of red, yellow, pink and orange. There is an organic sexuality to the work that harkens back to the flowers of Georgia O’Keeffe. That being said, Lundeberg also appears to be drawn to the natural world, which provides him with a sense of peace. To be sure, the message is life and the force of energy at the heart of many things whether it’s a planet, an earthly landscape, or a flower. Both Yayoi Kusuma and Ithell Colquhoun made striking series that bear much in common to this one; they paint multi-colored circular forms on a black ground and the feeling is that we observe an embryo in the first stage of conception.

Tidelands

1987

Helen Lundeberg Tidelands (1987)

It is a landscape painting with a thin strip of land on the bottom edge of the canvas and a huge sky rendered in curving stripes of orange, pink, grey and purple, which is the Tidelands by Helen Lundeberg Even though she is still rendering objects in an abstract manner, this painting exemplifies the late career style of Lundeberg’s Hard-edge Painting style, which had previously featured clean, hard lines. Ilene Susan Fort claims that: “After the death of her husband in 1978, Lundeberg found solace in painting. Only a few minor changes were made in her artistic and subject matter pursuits. At times, a more subdued colour palette evoked feelings of nostalgia. I’m creating more landscape and seascape images than ever before “For now. Instead of appearing hopeless (as some of Kay Sage’s paintings have been aptly referred to), the artworks appear more subdued.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
  • When Helen Lundeberg began to paint, she was a profound thinker who also had a deep appreciation for art.
  • All of nature, from the tiniest crustacean to the largest planet, was of interest to her, not just flowers or vegetables.
  • It is true that Lundeberg’s canvases burst forth with great energy as she sought to investigate and understand all aspects of life.
  • The two sides of her personality seemed to be at odds, but she was also a meticulous and methodical scientist, so what might appear to be a contradiction worked out perfectly.
  • Because of the length of her career and the fact that it spans nearly a century, she can be considered a milestone in the evolution of art from Surrealism to Post-Surrealism to abstraction.
  • It’s true that Lundeberg incorporated elements from as far back as the Renaissance and as far forward as Early Surrealism.
  • Because of her insatiable curiosity and penchant for fusing the natural world with the supernatural, her work resembles that of the Surrealists Ithell Colquhoun and Remedios Varo in many ways.
  • A process that ideally leads to illumination and understanding is the goal of all of these artists’ pursuit of knowledge.
  • After a long period of experimentation and experimentation, Lundeberg appears to have nailed it in her most recent works.
  • Lundeberg was both an artist and a thinker.
  • Consequently, she played a crucial role in the founding of two relatively influential new art movements as a result of this combination.
  • It was originally called ‘Subjective Classicism,’ but that name was later changed to ‘Post-Surrealism,’ and Lundeberg collaborated with Lorser Feitelson to write the manifesto for the movement.
  • It was a new form of abstraction known as ‘Hard-edge Painting,’ and once again the couple was at the heart of its development.
  • Lundeberg and Feitelson’s relationship was both romantic and professional, as ‘artists in love.’
  • Lundeberg, like Dorothea Tanning and Georgia O’Keefe, was supported by her artistic spouse, Max Ernst and Alfred Stieglitz.
  • Each of the three artists has remained childless, and each has created highly reflective visual spaces that allow for complex feelings related to childlessness to be addressed.
  • One gets the impression that Lundeberg’s influence bridges the continents of Europe and America.
  • With an interest in early European Surrealists such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, as well as American desert landscapes and the same kind of insatiable curiosity that drove Straight Photographers such as Edward Weston, she took inspiration from these artists.
  • Contrary to popular belief, Lundeberg established an American Surrealist identity while demonstrating that the most important themes in art are recurrent regardless of time or place.
  • The fact that Lundeberg is so enamoured with the planets and the cosmos shows just how much of a lifelong learner she is.
  • There is a striking resemblance between Luneberg’s later depictions of planets and those of Yayoi Kusama from the 1950s and Ithell Colquhoun from the 1970s, both of whom painted similar globular and otherworldly spheres on black backgrounds.
  • ChildhoodHelen Lundeberg was born in Chicago, but she lived most of her life in California after her family moved to Pasadena when she was four years old to accommodate her father’s job as a stock broker and real estate developer.
  • Childhood car rides with her parents and younger sister, where she would gaze out the window at the California landscape, were some of her happiest times.
  • Lundeberg was an excellent student from an early age, and he was enrolled in a special programme for gifted kids.
  • Her mother was ill, so she postponed enrolling in Pasadena Junior College for two years so she could be there to help out.
  • She briefly considered becoming a writer while in college because she has always been a voracious reader.
  • She honed her interest in astronomy and science in general as a result of her general thirst for knowledge.
  • Furthermore, she would later incorporate some of these studies into her Post-Surrealist works, such as scientific diagrams she had drawn and diagrams she had made while taking certain courses.
  • Early LifeThe beginning of Lundeberg’s formal training in art occurred in 1930.
  • Stickney Memorial School of Art paid for her to attend a three-month course after a family friend recognised the girl’s artistic ability.
  • This was the final straw for Lundeberg, who decided to finish her formal training in fine art at the same school where she had begun it.
  • As a new art student, her first few weeks were anything but smooth.
  • When artist Lorser Feitelson joined the teaching staff, he encouraged his students, including Lundeberg, to study the Old Masters and the Early Renaissance period.
  • Fifteen months after their first encounter together, the young artist had also fallen in love with Feitelson.
  • During her time alone in the drawing studio, she was working on a composition for a drawing when her new teacher walked in to introduce himself.
  • He then sat down next to her and proceeded to tell her everything she was doing wrong.
  • Feitelson is credited by Lundeberg as the person who helped her realise that she was an artist.
  • Unrelenting support and admiration from the beginning were his hallmarks.
  • Mid LifeAs soon as she finished her degree, Lundeberg’s relationship with Feitelson went beyond that of a student teacher.
  • Despite the fact that she was ten years her senior, and he was still married, she began seeing him romantically.
  • After the death of Feitelson’s first wife in 1956, the state of California made it difficult to obtain a divorce.
  • Lundeberg and Feitelson were finally able to tie the knot after more than two decades together.
  • Lundeberg and Feitelson’s professional artistic relationship was just as important as their love for each other.
  • Art historian Diane D. Moran describes Lundeberg’s work as “…the first American response to European Surrealism, the key distinction between the Californians’ emphasis on the processes of the rational mind, as opposed to the Europeans’ stress on hallucinations and… the Europeans’ emphasis on hallucinations and… the European…
  • Lundeberg was also responsible for writing the 1934 manifesto, New Classicism (or Subjective Classicism), which outlined the philosophies of the movement and later became better known as Post-Surrealism as artists exhibited together under this style.
  • Lundeberg wrote that “in New Classicism alone do we find an aesthetic that departs from the principles of the decorative graphic arts to found a unique order, and integrity of subject matter and pictorial structure unprecedented in the history of art.
  • “During the Great Depression, Lundeberg was hired to work on the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, which led to his departure from Post-Surrealism.
  • Large-scale, realism-based murals made up the bulk of her time with this organisation.
  • This is in stark contrast to earlier works in which she worked with a more abstract, Post-Surrealist style of art.
  • In her new role as an employed artist, she was able to earn a living while still carving out time for her own creative pursuits on the weekends and in the evenings.
  • She also had the opportunity to drive a five-ton truck for a mural project at the Fullerton, California City Hall while working for the WPA.
  • Because the other two members of her crew did not possess valid driver’s licences, Lundeberg was tasked with operating the vehicle.
  • Lundeberg visited New York City for the first time in 1946.
  • Feitelson accompanied the couple to museums and galleries, where they met other artists.
  • Attending an evening party at Peggy Guggenheim’s house, Lundeberg was able to admire Jackson Pollock’s artwork.
  • She, on the other hand, unlike many other artists of the time, had no desire to relocate to the city. “
  • Relative isolation” in California suited her and Feitelson’s “loner personalities,” according to her own words.
  • Often, she referred to herself and her partner, her husband, as a “group of two.”
  • Late LifeFeitelson influenced Lundeberg in the 1950s, when she began to focus on geometric shapes and simple block colours.
  • This was a major shift in her career.
  • Inspired by their own theories about “Hard-edge Painting,” they produced works that were far more abstract than previous ones.
  • Regarding her beginnings in this aesthetic, she once said: “Two factors led to the creation of my debut album, which is hard-edge.
  • The first thing that came to mind when I was thinking about the treatment of areas and spaces was this tendency that I already had, to suggest walls, floors, cast shadows, etc.
  • I would also look at Lorser’s Magical Space Forms, in which these flat areas are ambiguously positive and negative, and be enthralled by the three-dimensional possibilities I saw in these flat areas.
  • That was fine with me, but I wanted to put them to use for my own purposes.
  • “By the 1960s, Lundeberg’s work began to take on a more organic shape as she began to incorporate curving lines into her compositions.
  • She used masking tape instead of a pencil to draw the lines in her paintings, which were frequently depicted as arches.
  • It’s impossible to fiddle with a piece of tape while you’re applying it, she said.
  • Hard-edge works of the 1970s by Lundeberg began to incorporate more architectural elements and landscapes.
  • Giorgio de Chirico may have had an influence on this work, but it is interesting to note that the recurring arch formations are very similar to his work at this point.
  • Feitelson’s sudden death in 1978 was a devastating blow to Lundeberg, who had only recently been admitted to the hospital for an illness.
  • He was always a “grand support and encourager” for Lundeberg, something she felt was rare and not always the case with male artists for their artist wives.
  • Moran claims the following: “It’s hard not to feel a certain amount of emotional content in Lundeberg’s paintings from the years following this loss, given how strong and long their marriage was.
  • As we have seen, this artist has insisted on the importance of content for her throughout her entire career, which makes it difficult to interpret her work in any other way.”
  • In the final years of her life, Lundeberg’s art and career received increased recognition, including numerous exhibitions and awards.
  • A few years after saying, “As long as I can wiggle my brush,” Lundeberg continued to paint until 1990, when her health deteriorated so much that she couldn’t.
  • In 1999, she succumbed to pneumonia and died.
  • For more than a century, Helen Lundeberg had a profound influence on American art.
  • She was a key figure in the creation of two new and influential art movements, along with her husband and others.
  • That which was the first to show that American artists could have a significant impact on the future direction of art was Post-Surrealism.
  • Until this point in time, this kind of influence was largely reserved for Europeans.
  • In addition to Philip Guston and Grace Clements, many other artists adopted a Post-Surrealist aesthetic.
  • Even though the movement had a small following, it had a significant impact on the development of many important art movements, including Abstract Expressionism, which had a significant impact on other art movements as well.
  • “Hard-edge Painting” was perhaps Lundeberg’s most significant contribution to the art world.
  • Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko’s Color Field Painting movement was born out of the hard-edge movement’s interest in large blocks of flat colour and geometric abstraction.
  • In particular, Lundeberg’s art helped to draw attention to California and to American artists outside of New York City’s borders, both practically and theoretically.
  • A foundation is thus being laid for future generations of California artists, such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha as well as Mark Bradford and Bob Irwin.
  • She was a person who helped put California on the map when people were not looking to the United States at all as an arts centre, and certainly not looking to California,” says Carol Eliel, a Los Angeles-based art curator.
  • Just as Georgia O’Keeffe’s work cleared the way for more subtle, lyrical, and yet somehow fleshy painting as it evolved into more confident abstraction while still holding on to a passion for representation.
  • Yayoi Kusuma and Agnes Martin are among the artists who have been influenced by her work, which is linked to a younger generation of artists.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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