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MODERN PARALLELS:
The Paintings of Mary Henry and Helen Lundeberg
August 14-October 2, 2009
The Center, Ketchum

Born in California within five years of each other, painters Mary Henry (1913-2009) and Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) each had lengthy artistic careers. During the decades they were active as artists, their careers converged and diverged in striking ways. This exhibition will trace the trajectories of these two women from their early works to those made in the later decades of their lives.

Both Lundeberg and Henry worked as artists for the WPA in the 1930s, creating prints and murals in a figurative style typical of the regionalist aesthetic that dominated American art during the period. In 1934, Lundeberg and her husband, painter Lorser Feitelson, co-founded a movement they called Subjective Classicism or Post Surrealism, an infusion of rationality into Surrealist theory, and began producing still lifes and landscapes that juxtaposed incongruous objects and spaces in intriguing compositions. Henry, in early 1943, attended a lecture by Bauhaus constructivist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy that altered the course of her career. After studying with Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, she began working in the rigorous geometric style that would dominate her work for decades, producing clean, hard-edged abstractions that ranged in size from tiny drawings to enormous diptychs and triptychs. By the 1950s, Lundeberg, too, had moved toward geometric abstraction. Unlike Henry, she rarely abandoned representation entirely, but instead painted abstract, linear compositions suggestive of landscape or architecture.

Although Henry and Lundeberg both moved from a representational style to geometric abstraction, neither ever saw their work as divorced from the real world, and each believed their paintings reflected a particular connection to the natural world. Throughout her career, Lundeberg found inspiration in the colors and light of nature. And while Henry’s paintings appear at first to be entirely separate from the organic, she believes geometry is fundamental to all natural structures. Moreover, Henry has written, “I am not interested in portraying life but I am interested in portraying ideas and emotions.” Henry might have written the same of Lundeberg; each hoped their paintings would convey moods and ideas to their viewers.

Despite the fact that both Henry and Lundeberg were born and spent much of their lives in California, worked in a geometric style, and were women painters, their pairing tells a story much broader than that of their similarities. Featuring work that ranges from regionalist lithographs and Post Surrealist compositions to large scale geometric abstractions, the exhibition illuminates not only the careers of these painters but the history of modernism in the United States.