OCTOBER 10 – DECEMBER 23, 2020
The Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Lorser Feitelson: Allegorical Confessions, 1943-1945 at Louis Stern Fine Arts. For a brief period in the artist’s decades long career, between 1943 and 1945, Lorser Feitelson produced a series of about nineteen paintings best known today as the “Romantic Series” but identified by the artist as his “Allegoric Confessions”. First exhibited as a group in 1944 at the San Francisco Museum of Art (the predecessor of SFMOMA), these “Romantic” paintings display fluid brushstrokes and sensual color evoking such disparate influences as the art of late Baroque Naples and the Romantic paintings of Delacroix and Gericault. Described in 1944 by Los Angeles art critic Arthur Millier as the work of an “artist in transition”, the “Romantic” series falls chronologically between Feitelson’s Post-Surrealist Period and the abstraction of his Magical Space Forms. While it may be tempting, at first glance, to view these paintings as a radical departure from the rest of Feitelson’s oeuvre, this important exhibition allows the viewer to observe the presence of consistent themes, such as the artist’s concern for structure, which would preoccupy Feitelson over the course of his artistic career.
Exhibition of Lorser Feitelson’s “Romantic Series” at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1944.
The artist's personal copy of the installation photograph, Lorser Feitelson, San Francisco Museum of Art, April 18 to May 7, 1944, unknown photographer.
The exhibition features thirteen paintings produced by Lorser Feitelson between 1943 and 1945. Of the thirteen paintings included in the exhibition, five can be confidently counted among the nineteen paintings exhibited in the original 1944 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. In the above photograph of the 1944 San Francisco exhibition, two paintings now on view in the exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts can be identified: Allegory of the Golden Apple (Configuration: Judgment of Paris) and Three Girls.
Lorser Feitelson, Three Girls, 1943, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm. © The Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation, Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts.
https://www.louissternfinearts.com/
Jordan Hallmark, Researcher
October 13, 2020