Helen Lundeberg “Classic Attitude”

Cristin Tierney Gallery

This event has ended.

Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to present Classic Attitude, an exhibition of
hard-edged abstract paintings from the early 1960s by Helen Lundeberg.
This is the gallery’s first exhibition of Lundeberg’s work.

Helen Lundeberg was a leading figure of west coast abstraction in the
post-war era. An active painter and writer, she was at the epicenter of a
dynamic group of Los Angeles artists and critics that included Lorser Feitelson,
Karl Benjamin, Jules Langsner, John McLaughlin, and Frederick Hammersley.
Along with her peers, Lundeberg’s work formed the core of what later became
known as California hard-edged painting. Although her contributions to
American abstraction have long been recognized on the west coast,
Lundeberg has yet to receive her due in the east.

In the 1960s Lundeberg created a body of work considered to be her finest
and most distinct. Distilled to essential elements of line, color, and space, her
hard-edged paintings from this period effect a coherence of composition that
borders on the sublime. Classic Attitude presents a selection of paintings from
this moment, featuring works that are united by their compositional balance,
subtleties of color, and pictorial refinement. The title of the exhibition derives
from a statement Lundeberg wrote for a 1942 exhibition at MoMA:

By classicism I mean, not traditionalism of any sort, but a highly
conscious concern with esthetic structure which is the antithesis
of intuitive, romantic, or realistic approaches to painting. My aim,
realized or not, is to calculate, and reconsider, every element in
a painting with regard to its function in the whole organization.
That, I believe, is the classic attitude.[1]

Lundeberg’s attention to formal elements such as balance and color connect
her to a previous generation of abstract artists, including Henri Matisse, Piet
Mondrian, and Josef Albers. Similarly, her reductive forms, flat surfaces, and
spare compositions link her to contemporaries such as Ad Reinhardt,
Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin. But unlike these other artists, Lundeberg’s
vision of abstraction remained connected to the world around her. In Desert
Road, Lundeberg’s flat, unmodulated swaths of color coalesce to form the
view suggested by the painting’s title. Dramatic landscapes and architectural
vistas such as these were composed of forms remembered—things “imagined
rather than ‘seen,’” as she stated later in life.[2] The works presented in
Classic Attitude encapsulate Lundeberg’s unique approach, and underscore
her rightful place in the art historical canon.

Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) was born in Chicago and graduated from
Pasadena City College in 1930. She co-founded the movement Subjective
Classicism, also known as Post Surrealism, before becoming an integral part
of the west coast abstract circle. In spring 2016 The Laguna Art Museum
presented a retrospective of her work. She has also had solo exhibitions at
The Fresno Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University Art
Museum in Santa Barbara, Long Beach Museum of Art, and Santa Barbara
Museum of Art. Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Norton
Simon Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Laguna Art Museum,
Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
Orange County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
San Diego Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Norton Museum of Art,
Georgia Museum of Art, and Fresno Art Museum.