As Feitelson’s reductive process gravitated towards the “Magical Forms, and these are the largest contingent of works here, his color palette opened up and explicit figuration is dropped. Only an “Untitled” 1949 work describing a form at once female and bird-like balanced on a narrow red panel thrust in space obliquely retains a component that is explicitly figurative. The forms and the space into which they are thrust — and thrust they certainly are — ground themselves with protrusions that narrow to spear points in four works of the immediate post-war period. The impulse feels, particularly in the larger context of Feitelson’s body of work, like a years-long struggle between holding firm and letting go. Looking at a 1950 “Untitled” Magical Forms beside a 1951 “Magical Space Forms” painting marks a central period of transition: the space moves from an insistent and self-conscious pursuit that finally flattens out. The 1951 painting is a straight negative-against-positive ground graphic featuring a spiky claw that screams a desire to match the aggression of the new Abstract Expressionist work coming out of New York; but the artist’s heart is not in that, and he will never test the expressive possibility of gesture.
“Lorser Feitelson: Figure to Form” at Louis Stern Fine Arts is a small but insightful survey of the noted painter’s transition from Post-Surrealism to Hard-Edge Abstraction.