Helen Lundeberg & The Four Abstract Classicists

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present an ensemble of works by Helen Lundeberg and the four artists included in the seminal 1959 exhibitionThe Four Abstract Classiciststhat opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling Los Angles County Museum of Art, Lorser Feiteleson, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley and Karl Benjamin.

This pairing, inspired by the 1959 photograph of the fourabstract classist’smeeting with the curator Jules Langsner surrounded by a display of Lundeberg’s paintings, celebrates Helen Lundeberg not as the 5th “classicist” as some have suggested but rather as a unique member of this group known for a style of painting namedWest Coast Hard-edge.

“I really didn’t fit that Abstract Classicist show. But later on Jules included me in a California hard-edge show. His definition of hard-edge at that time relaxed or enlarged by 1964”.
- Helen Lundeberg in interview with Jan Butterfield, 1980

“Lundeberg’s art as a whole possesses all three legs of the tripod on which most good art rests: It’s good-looking, it gives us something to think about, and it conveys the personality of the artist”.
- Peter Plagens, Wall Street Journal, 2016