Abstract shapes balanced and quirky
The derring-do that viewers often associate with avant-garde art is nowhere to be found in Helen Lundeberg's handsomely composed pictures. They flirt with abstraction but never give themselves over to its uncertainties, preferring, instead, to stick to depicting the visible world. Such have-it-both-ways balance is usually a recipe for blandness. But Lundeberg (1908-99) made it engaging -- not quite exciting, but filled with enough quirky kicks that her tasteful, often serene paintings still deliver the lasting satisfactions they set out to.
At Louis Stern Fine Arts, "Infinite Distance: Architectural Compositions by Helen Lundeberg" includes a substantial percentage of highlights among its 21 works as it deftly surveys the L.A. painter's career. The earliest works, from 1943 and 1946, are note-card-size landscapes with a whisper of Surrealism drifting though their simple setups, which resemble open-air stage sets. Think Giorgio de Chirico goes to the beach and is enchanted by the expansiveness.
Lundeberg's next paintings feature split compositions, the simplest divided right down the middle, with a schematic still life or interior on the left and a landscape or exterior on the right. Some of these, such as "Silent Interior" from 1952 and its larger, 4-by-5-foot reworking from 1959, are among Lundeberg's boldest.
In the 1960s, Lundeberg settled on the format she would explore for the rest of her career: the permeable boundary between interior and exterior, as it often takes shape in the architecture of Southern California. Windows, doorways, porches, colonnades, arches and corridors, as well as picture frames, mirrors and bridges, appear in nearly all of her stylized compositions.
The basic shapes in Lundeberg's paintings recall early 20th century Modernist photography, particularly the strand that focused on the abstract configurations of the urban environment. "Interior With Table," "Interior With Mirror," "Shadow of the Bridge I" and "Evening View" appear to be simple arrangements of straight and curved lines until you read their titles and see the objects and spaces Lundeberg's shapes describe.
The best paintings create spaces that cannot be so easily tracked back to the visible world. Nearly 8 feet long, "Arches 5" is the largest work in the show, the most rhythmic and the most dynamic. Its visual ambiguities give rise to pleasurably jarring shifts. Other paintings appear to depict upside-down archways that Lundeberg has superimposed atop one another, playing up the subtle color shifts that are her specialty.
