ART REVIEW : Celebrating the Independent Lundeberg

The intimate, 21-painting “Birthday Tribute to Helen Lundeberg,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Jan. 8, celebrates the artist’s 80th year and reminds us of the depth, sensitivity, plastic and poetic fluency that rank Lundeberg among Los Angeles’ unfaltering modernist mainstays.

Lundeberg hit the art scene in the early ‘30s when she and her husband, the late and equally respected artist Lorser Feitelson, founded Classical Surrealism, aimed at putting rational reigns on European Surrealism. The movement is less important than the rich paintings created under its name, works close to De Chirico but more delicate in their touch and more calculated in their structure.

In these early works, obliquely related objects--isolated furniture, stacks of books, floating spheres, classical ruins, still burning cigarettes--are carefully combined by Lundeberg to enhance suggestive impact. Many of these paintings already evince themes that remain important to Lundeberg today. Robust pods suspended in still quiet spaces, scientific diagrams and gadgetry, planets orbiting in space use the meteorological syntax of poetry to call up regeneration, at the macro level of the universe and the micro level of the single creative act.

In “Plant and Animal Analogies” (1934-35), a fleshy female torso turns into geometrically carved clay at the shoulders. A tight, nearly clinical black-and-white drawing of a uterus with minute capillaries and developing fetus is superimposed on the figure and related via diagrammatic arrows to the vein-like branches of a tree and the internal structure of a seed pod. This lush oil on celotex work shows a 26-year-old Lundeberg already in command of her medium, staking a conceptual and humanistic role for painting at a time when ‘30s currents offered sappy realism or hermetic non-objectivity.

Perhaps influenced by Feitelson’s abstract art, in the ‘50s Lundeberg pared down canvases to single isolated animate or inanimate objects--a hand holding flowers, a chair holding a piece of bright, wet fruit, a painting in a painting--locked in taut planes of color. She was lumped in with formalist hard-edge painters, but Lundeberg herself emphasized that she eliminated detail to push subjective, enigmatic ends. Of this group, “Selma” is exceptional. “The Mirror” is a beautiful example of Lundeberg’s gift for pitting acute, dream realism against strictly chromatic illusions of depth.

Through the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, Lundeberg refined imagery even more to include mainly mysterious landscapes and interiors. In “Shadow on the Road to the Sea” (1960), the mind turns the perfectly calibrated geometry of a single triangle and several arcs into a moody road sweeping quickly toward a wisp of sky and water. With the subtlest modulations of light over seal, slate and taupe grays, “Gray Interior III” (1980) transforms rectangles into fun-house corridors opening infinitely but leading nowhere. In “Wetlands IV” (1984) she is just as comfortable and competent in loose organic contours that suggest aerial views of pastel marshes.

This not-to-be-missed, amply deserved tribute honors the 50-year career of an independent, thoughtful artist impervious to bandwagon antics and unwilling to let her work petrify into predictability.