Lorser Feitelson: The Kinetic Series

In 1913 the fifteen-year-old Lorser Feitelson was inspired by the Armory Show in New York to become a painter. The show displayed the new art from Europe, which astonished the public and many of the more traditional American artists. At the Armory, a vast display of “Modern Art” from Goya and Ingres to Brancusi and Duchamp astounded the visitors. It was undoubtedly the paintings by Matisse and Duchamp as well as Picabia’s dynamic Dances at the Spring that exerted the greatest impression on the young Lorser Feitelson.

When Lorser Feitelson made his “Kinetic Studies”, he was in command of an active visual archive and of many aspects of the theories of modernist art. In these paintings the artist makes use of the Futurist device of multiple parallel lines to convey sequential movement. The interplay of light and dark in these pivotal works helps create a sense of dynamic activity in the viewer’s eye.