Lorser Feitelson

Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) was an artist known as one of the founding fathers of Southern California-based hard-edge painting. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Feitelson was raised in New York City, where his family relocated rapidly after his birth. His rise to beat occurred after he moved to California in 1927.

Feitelson, along afterward his peers Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin, was featured in the landmark 1959 exhibition Four Abstract Classicists at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and highly developed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Curated by Los Angeles-based critic and curator Jules Langsner, the exhibition introduced the general public to the dazzling visual language created by a revolutionary action of painters. A revised financial credit of this exhibition re-titled West Coast Hard Edge was presented in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and then in Belfast, Northern Ireland at Queens Court. The painting "Magical Space Forms" from 1951, reproduced below, was included in this exhibition.

Feitelson, along bearing in mind his wife Helen Lundeberg and the abovementioned artists, pioneered a endeavor that has been applauded by the Orange County Museum of Art's nationally toured exhibition Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury. Contemporary art writer and scholar Dave Hickey, in his 2004 exhibition at the Otis College of Art and Design, christened Feitelson and the further hard-edge painters as the Los Angeles School.

These artists made obscure contributions to the take forward of American abstract painting. According to Hickey: “The New York School painters would create their idiom by internalizing abstraction, psychologizing it later than Freud and Jung. The California painters accept the opposite route by radically externalizing the surrealism of experience in the West. Their presumption, that surreality, visual anxiety and splendor have their roots in the brute and social world rather than the autonomous self, set art upon the West Coast forgive from the rigor of concept and the regime of the personal that dominated American art in that moment. In the broader sense, this externalized vision granted artists the privilege of their sanity in a manic, narcissistic cultural moment and, in achievement so, created the conditions out of which the language of art in Southern California art would development in the late twentieth century.”