Landscape seen and thought: a six-decade survey revealed the often sublime and always disciplined vision of Helen Lundeberg, one of L.A.'s most admired painters

Art in America, April, 2005 by Michael Duncan

Los Angeles at last seems to be acknowledging that its art history did not begin with the Ferus Gallery, Ed Kienholz and Ed Ruscha. By the late 1940s, in fact, the area had developed a distinctive school of hard-edge geometric abstraction, which was celebrated in the 1959 exhibition "Four Abstract Classicists" that featured works by John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin and Frederick Hammersley. (1) Seemingly in response to the revival of that style in the past few years by a number of young West Coast painters (such as Yek, Bart Exposito, Tim Bavington and Darcy Huebler), the Abstract Classicists have all been featured in recent exhibitions. (2) This winter, Dave Hickey organized a group show--pointedly titled "The Los Angeles School"--at the Otis College of Art and Design that included the quartet from the 1959 show along with two women working at the time who were unjustly omitted: Helen Lundeberg and June Harwood. (3)

Lundeberg (1908-1999) has chiefly been recognized for her psychologically astute serf-portraits and allegorical still lifes of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s, however, she began to use spare, geometric shapes in abstract compositions that convey the quiescence of nature. A recent revolving exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood of about 40 of her paintings (from 1933 to '90) demonstrated the quiet power of her work and its contemporary relevance.

Evoking space through horizon lines, suggestions of architecture and crisp shadows, Lundeberg's paintings distill natural vistas into flat, subtly colored arrangements of rectangles, trapezoids, stripes and smoothly curved shapes. Like Ellsworth Kelly, Lundeberg reduces the visual field to essential, simplified forms, while relying more on a conventional notion of the picture plane as a window onto the world. Her first painting in an abstract style, A Quiet Place (1950), suggests an ambiguously defined courtyard flanked by rectilinear columns and passageways. Later paintings present landscapes compartmentalized by waterways, roads or architecture. One untitled painting from 1959, for example, features a moonlike disc behind a group of brown, slab-like stripes that read as simplified columns or tree trunks.

Coming of age in 1920s Pasadena, Lundeberg saw the region grow from an agricultural community to a bustling city. In art school, she came under the spell of her professor, Lorser Feitelson, an experienced artist who had exhibited in Europe and New York. A devotee of Renaissance draftsmanship, Feitelson imbued Lundeberg with a deep respect for classical composition. In the early 1930s the two artists, who later married, organized the short-lived "Post Surrealism" movement, a sophisticated response to Surrealism made at a time when the European movement was barely known in this country. The Post Surrealists--a group of about 10 artists that included Knud Merrill and the young Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish--advocated the creation of symbolic tableaux based not on dream imagery but on conscious, rational associations. Lundeberg's paintings from that period are rebuslike compositions of tightly rendered symbols. (4)

The Louis Stern exhibition included a few paintings in the Post Surrealist style that read as symbolic landscapes. Sundial (1934), featuring a desert of stark, monumentlike rocks, and Biological Fantasy (1946), with its crepuscular setting for podlike growths, demonstrate the cerebral quality that underlies all of Lundeberg's work. As Lundeberg insisted throughout her career, her paintings are studio inventions and not based on actual scenes. (5)

In the reductive landscapes of the early 1960s, she continued to simplify and refine her vision. Receding perspective lines in paintings such as Cimmerian Landscape (1960) and Waterways #1 (1961) cut through fields of twilight hues so that the works resemble bird's-eye views of roads and rural aqueducts. Topographical maps and aerial surveys of America's agricultural heartland clearly influenced the work.

Seascapes from 1963 employ brighter colors. A glistening triptych from that year, not exhibited since Lundeberg's 1981 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, presents a 17-foot panorama of crisply delineated green fields and vibrant blue water, set against an implied sky and foreground of unpainted primed canvas. The triptych's use of negative space to set off the landscape isolates the pure colors. Striations running along the entire expanse of the horizon recall similar effects in Hokusai prints and other Japanese graphic arts.

Against a spotless white field, an attenuated form in the stark dominant hue of Green River (1963)--a maplike depiction of a branching stream--reads as a large-scale calligraphic character. Lundeberg was fascinated by the perceptual extremes of microcosms and macrocosms. The insistent oddity of her painted aerial views seems intended to underscore the purely illusory character of any system that purports to control or discipline nature. Elsewhere she uses architecture as a kind of framing device for the contemplation of vastness. The solid forms in the foreground of Evening (1964) suggest a terrace that offers an endless vista into autumnal, olive-tinged light, piqued by a swipe of violet and a sunset stripe of fading pink.