Lorser Feitelson

Lorser Feitelson
Lorser Feitelson, 1952, Pasadena Art Museum
Born	I. Lorser Feitelson 1898 Savannah, Georgia, United States
Died	1978 Los Angeles, California, United States
Nationality	American
Education	Self-taught
Known for	Painter
Movement	Hard Edge painting, Modernist
Spouse(s)	Helen Lundeberg

Lorser Feitelson (1898, Savannah, GA – 1978, Los Angeles, CA) was born in Savannah, Georgia, but was raised in New York City, where his family relocated shortly after his birth. Feiltelson rose to prominence on the West Coast as one of the founding fathers of Southern California-based Hard Edge painting.

Lorser Feitelson's works, alongside those of along with his peers Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin, were featured in the landmark 1959 exhibition Four Abstract Classicists at the San Francisco Museum of Art and later traveled to Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Curated by Los Angeles-based critic and curator Jules Langsner, the exhibition introduced the general public to the dazzling visual language created by a revolutionary group of painters. A revised version of this exhibition re-titled West Coast Hard Edge was presented in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and then in Belfast, Northern Ireland at Queens Court. The painting "Magical Space Forms" from 1951, reproduced below, was included in this exhibition.

Feitelson, along with his wife Helen Lundeberg and the aforementioned artists, pioneered a movement that has been celebrated by the Orange County Museum’s nationally toured exhibition Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury. Additionally, contemporary art writer and scholar Dave Hickey, in his 2004 exhibition at the Otis College of Art and Design, christened Feitelson and the other Hard Edge painters as The Los Angeles School.

These artists made profound contributions to the development of American abstract painting. According to Hickey: “The New York School painters would create their idiom by internalizing abstraction, psychologizing it in the manner of Freud and Jung. The California painters take the opposite route by radically externalizing the surrealism of experience in the West. Their presumption, that surreality, visual anxiety and splendor have their roots in the physical and social world rather than the autonomous self, set art on the West Coast free from the rigor of concept and the regime of the personal that dominated American art in that moment. In the broader sense, this externalized vision granted artists the privilege of their sanity in a manic, narcissistic cultural moment and, in doing so, created the conditions out of which the language of art in Southern California art would evolve in the late twentieth century.”