Lorser Feitelson

Background

Lorser Feitelson was born in 1898 in Savannah, Georgia, United States. He was raised in New York City, where his family relocated shortly after his birth.

Education

Feitelson was home-schooled in drawing by his art-loving father.

Career

Lorser Feitelson came to Los Angeles in 1927, bringing with him Modernist ideas he had adopted while living in New York and Paris. Highly influential as a leader and teacher in the art community, (Feitelson taught at the highly influential Chouinard Art Institute and ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena) Feitelson helped to establish Los Angeles as the important art center it is today. With his wife Helen Lundeberg in 1934, Feitelson founded Subjective Classicism, better known as Post Surrealism.

From roughly 1940 to 1960, Feitelson embarked upon a remarkable exploration of abstract forms. Rooted in the figurative world, Feitelson’s compositions evolved from the organic into the geometric. Known as Abstract Classicism, or Hard Edge, that period of Feitelson’s work offered unique imagery that maintained the profound sense of space and form associated with traditional Classicism. He was one of the four artists featured in the landmark 1959 Four Abstract Classicists exhibition curated by Jules Langsner at the Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park.

Between 1963 and 1969, Feitelson produced a series of paintings that showed the range of experimentation possible with a single compositional element: the line. Straight or curving, of uniform or tapered width, the lines in those works demonstrated the artist’s preoccupation with the relationship of the “container to the contained.” In each painting, he employed lines with minimal stylization to define the space inside the four edges of the work. In "Untitled (December)" from 1969, two deep red lines — one uniform, one not — arc across the pale field of the canvas to the edges, where they extend over the sides.

At times the lines come close to each other, and at others they curve away. Their proximity creates a tension bordering on sensual — a suggestion that Feitelson acknowledged in these works while also encouraging other associations. Seemingly simple in composition, line paintings like "Untitled (December)" were in fact precisely arranged to be self-sufficient: complete artistic statements with everything needed for interpretation contained within the picture. As time went on, Feitelson began reducing his compositions, focusing on the essentials. From the mid-1960s, he ventured into Minimalism, creating sleek paintings comprised of sensuous lines set against solid backgrounds of color. Those works were a culmination of Feitelson’s experience and represent decades of artistic development.

Feitelson’s oeuvre has been featured in the Orange County Museum of Art’s "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury" in 2007, as well as the J. Paul Getty Museum’s “Pacific Standard Time” during 2011 - 2012. Works by Feitelson are included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous other public and private collections.

Achievements

• Lorser rose to prominence in the 1950s as one of the founders of Hard Edge Painting.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Dichotomic Organization

  • Untitled (January 30)

  • Untitled

  • Flight Over New York At Twilight

  • Magical Space Forms

  • Magical Space Forms (Black, Fuchsia)

  • Untitled (Boulder Series)

  • Untitled

  • Genesis #2

  • Dichotomic Organization: Stripes

  • Untitled

  • Untitled (April 30)

  • Untitled (February)

  • unknown title

  • Magical Space Forms

  • Magical Forms

  • Post Surreal Configuration: Eternal Recurrence

  • Untitled (September 22)

  • The Fountain

  • Archimage #2

  • Untitled (Black and White Lines on Red Background)

  • Magical Space Forms

  • Untitled

  • Untitled (February 4)

Views

Lorser Feitelson adhered to the artistic traditions of Surrealism and Post-Painterly Abstraction.

Quotations: "I have tried to create a wonder-world of formidable mood-evoking form, color, space, and movement: a configuration that for me metaphorically expresses the deep disturbance of our time: ominously magnificent and terrifying events, hurtling menacingly from the unforeseeable."

Interests

• Artists

  Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, and the Italian Futurists

Connections

Lorser Feitelson was married to the painter Helen Lundeberg.

Spouse:

Helen Lundeberg

References

• Lorser Feitelson: The Late Paintings
  2009
• Lorser Feitelson: The Kinetic Series, Works from 1916-1923
  2005
• Lorser Feitelson and the invention of hard edge painting, 1945-1965
  2003
• Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective Exhibition
  1980
• Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundenberg: A Retrospective Exhibition
  1980
• Lorser Feitelson: Drawings on Classic Themes and Others
  1979
• Lorser Feitelson: Eternal Recurrence
  2014