LAGUNA BEACH, CA.- Laguna Art Museum is showing three new exhibitions to the public; Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective; Frederick Hammersley: Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection; and City Life, Los Angeles: 1930s to 1950s. The exhibitions will close May 30, 2016.

Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective
Laguna Art Museum is organizing the first comprehensive exhibition of the work of a key figure in twentieth-century California art, Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999).

Featuring approximately sixty paintings, it surveys Lundeberg’s career systematically, beginning with her landmark Post-Surrealist paintings of the 1930s. With her teacher and later husband Lorser Feitelson, she organized the Post-Surrealist group, the first of its kind in the United States, and wrote its manifesto. Though exploring psychology and personal expression, the Post Surrealists aimed to bring a greater sense of order and control to European Surrealism and originally styled themselves New Classicists. By the late 1950s Lundeberg was working on a larger scale. She simplified her style into broad, flat areas of color and, though never a pure abstractionist, played a key part in the “hard-edge” tendency in mid-century painting. Bringing de Chirico-like ambiguities of space to architectural and landscape compositions, she preserved the enigmatic mood of her earlier, surrealistic imagery.

The exhibition follows upon an upswing in Lundeberg’s reputation. She is the subject of a substantial monograph by Suzanne Muchnic, published in 2014, and has been included in some recent international exhibitions—notably In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 2012-13.

Frederick Hammersley: Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection
The museum’s collection is rich in drawings and prints by the renowned Los Angeles modernist Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009). This is largely thanks to the donation of thirty-eight of his works on paper by the Frederick Hammersley Foundation in 2014. The works range from casual studies from life to carefully composed abstractions. Hammersley was part of the same artistic circle as Helen Lundeberg, and the museum’s large-scale retrospective of Lundeberg’s work provides an opportune moment to show for the first time the bulk of its Hammersley holdings.

City Life, Los Angeles: 1930s to 1950s
Beginning in the 1930s, many American artists turned their attention to scenes of everyday life rendered in a realistic style. Often their paintings celebrated the development of the modern city and its hustle-bustle of activity. This exhibition focuses on urban scenes by the group of artists—most members of the California Water Color Society—who were the leading proponents of “American Scene” painting in California.