OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Lorser Feitelson was born in 1898 in New York City. He lived and worked in Paris between 1919 and 1926, during which time, he exhibited there and in the United States. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1927, he brought with him the Modernist ideas he had developed during those years. He exhibited and taught, meeting student Helen Lundeberg in 1934, who became both his wife and co-founder of Post-Surrealism. Rejecting the unconscious and dream-inspired works of European Surrealism, he focused upon conscious, carefully selected subjects pertaining to universal themes such as love, life and death. For roughly twenty years, from 1940 to 1960, Feitelson embarked upon a remarkable exploration of abstract forms.
From 1956 to 1963, Feitelson hosted a television series on NBC: ?Feitelson on Art.? He continued to paint and by 1959, was featured in the exhibition, ?Four Abstract Classicists? (with Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersly, and John McLaughlin) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As time went on, Feitelson began drastically reducing his compositions. From the mid-1960s, he ventured into Minimalism, creating sleek paintings comprised of sensuous lines set against solid backgrounds of color.
Lorser Feitelson's works are included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and numerous other public and private collections. Feitelson died in Los Angeles in 1978 as one of the founding fathers of Southern California-based Hard Edge painting.