ART REVIEW : Helen Lundeberg’s Quest for Purity, Reality, Illusion

This country is not quite civilized. If it were, it would designate its most cherished artists as living treasures, as the Japanese do. One of them would have to be the Los Angeles painter Helen Lundeberg. Her 60-year career is presently mirrored in about that many works at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery, which does a surprisingly good job of surveying the main points of her art, as well as revealing little-known aspects of her sensibility.

The artist is 87, ailing and probably the last survivor of the generation that pioneered modernism in Angeltown. Born in Chicago, she grew up in Pasadena. She wanted to become a writer, but her art teacher convinced her otherwise. The teacher was Lorser Feitelson, whom she later married.

The 1930 painting that persuaded both of them that Lundeberg had the right stuff is on view. Titled “The Apple Harvest,” it reflects the Regionalist manner of the epoch, but it’s more lyrical. Lovely lasses loll about or help strapping, shiny-faced youths pick fruit. A picture about the innocence of young love is about as timeless as they get. Lundeberg’s work changed markedly, but she never lost interest in the theme of how the personal and the universal contain one another.

In 1934, she launched with Feitelson what was certainly L.A.’s first consciously crafted art movement, complete with manifesto. Called Post-Surrealism, it echoed the older style purged of its weirder overtones. It attained a kind of classical demeanor and attracted other L.A. artists like Grace Clements and Knud Merrild. The movement faded away but not before attracting national recognition to its practitioners.

A surreal stamp stayed on Lundeberg’s art, even if it was only a sense of dreaminess. “Biological Fantasy” is a curious image of two tiny figures suspended in an ominous void far away from sets of contorted verticals floating in the foreground. These verticals resemble another subject unusual in her work. She has occasionally drawn the upper branches of barren trees. They appear, not dead, but dormant as in winter. They are at once about loss and promise, as is her little “Abandoned Easel #4.”

Like many artists of her generation, Lundeberg got through the Depression working on art for the Work Projects Administration. There is a preparatory gouache for a “History of Transportation” mural in Inglewood’s Centinela Park. (The mural was damaged recently, and efforts to have it restored haven’t gotten far in these strapped times.)

The artist’s mural experience may have imbued her with a taste for larger scale. Her work is never huge, but it grew over the years. It also grew progressively nonobjective. By 1961, she was painting hard-edge abstractions such as “Marina.” There is curious tension in the close match of its two colors, dark blue and brown. In it, a rectangle torques, making the picture feel as if it were trying to get at something beyond art.

Later images brighten. “The Planet #3,” of 1965, continues a gentle optical contradiction that makes it both solid and void. In another painting, she melds the new and the old so that the abstract edges turn into a windowsill bearing ripening fruit.

The most recent canvas here is “Two Mountains,” of 1990. Actually, it’s one mountain reflected in a lake. It seems to attest to an art that seeks purity, wondering if that quality can be found in reality or illusion, and if those two elements are one and the same.

* Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd.; to Oct. 30, closed Mondays . (213) 933-5523.