HELEN LUNDEBERG (1908-1999) was born in Chicago and moved to Pasadena, California, with her parents and younger sister, Inez in 1912. She was a gifted child who loved to read and envisioned a career in writing. After completing two years of junior college near the family home in Pasadena, the prospect of transferring to a university was daunting and impossible due to family finances and responsibilities. Almost by chance, a family friend sponsored art classes for her at the small Stickney Memorial School of Art in Pasadena. When Lorser Feitelson took over her class in 1930, she became increasingly aware that her intellect and abilities were well suited to a career in fine artist.
Feitelson’s teaching method introduced Lundeberg to all forms of art and composition although she was particularly drawn to early Italian Classicism. Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico and their formal approach to composition moved and inspired her throughout the rest of her career. Within a year of starting art classes, she submitted Apple Harvesters, 1930 to a museum competitive exhibition and was accepted.
Now as colleagues, in 1934 Lundeberg founded a movement with Feitelson which they called Subjective Classicism or New Classicism which came to be known as Post Surrealism. Unlike European Surrealism, Post Surrealism did not rely on random, dream, personally symbolic or arbitrary imagery. Instead, carefully planned objects or props were used to guide the viewer through the painting, gradually revealing a deeper and inter-connected meaning. This method of working appealed to Lundeberg's highly intellectual sensibilities and predilection for formal composing.
Lundeberg wrote and published the Post Surrealist manifesto to accompany several exhibitions. Other artists joined their movement which caught the attention of east coast museums as Lundeberg’s reputation grew. In the years and decades to follow, Feitelson used Lundeberg’s paintings as exemplary when he discussed this challenging movement.
Several of Lundeberg’s Post Surreal paintings fell under her category “Mood Entities”. Not satisfied with purely formal arrangements, she wanted a subjective quality, something evocative that would give her paintings “mood”. Hired by WPA to create lithographs, easel paintings and murals which paid the bills, her private studio time was devoted to intimate and highly personal and mysterious paintings inbued with mood. Througout the rest of her career, her pieces reflect her love for formal composing invoked with mood.
Imagined or remembered imagery of landscapes, still life arrangements, interior walls and windows with views into deeper space became the props for her language of formal and mood. Knowing that working in a totally non-objective way would eliminate her methods of evoking mood, she did not in the 1950s or ever adopt the methods of flat plane geometric abstraction.
Lundeberg and Feitelson finally married in 1956 after his first wife passed away. Long a couple by that time, they shared studio space as she painted during the day and he in the evenings after teaching. Contentedly living and working in a storefront, her life revolved around her work and Feitelson. Travelling little and with the freedom to work uninterruptedly, she produced an impressive quantity of work. When acrylic paint became available and she like working in this quick-drying medium, her productivity exploded.
When Feitelson passed away in 1978, Lundeberg set to executing paintings she composed and started during his illness. Her final series of interiors and still lifes distilled to perfect and supreme self-confidence her art language of formal and subjective.
Throughout her 6 decades of productivity, her lyrical, introspective yet communicative paintings have found an increasing audience through their quiet mystery. Limiting her pallette to usually three colors plus black and white she expressed her mystery in hushes of limited tone and chroma.
Helen Lundeberg's works are included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Laguna Art Museum, The Phillips Collection, The Figge Museum, and numerous other public and private collections.