Post-surrealism

also: Subjective Classicism · New Classicism

movement from 1934 Los Angeles California

Post-surrealism was the first concentrated American response to European Surrealism. It began in Los Angeles in 1934, when painters Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson issued a manifesto - their program was first called Subjective Classicism - arguing that art should convey the relationship between perception and concept. Where European surrealists courted chance and the raw dream image, post-surrealists planned everything: carefully staged subjects lead the viewer through a picture toward a concealed idea, and each canvas is organized around a single "mood entity", a state of mind the work exists to evoke. Lundeberg and Feitelson gathered a loose circle that included Philip Guston, Grace Clements, and Knud Merrild, and the style took root across California in the 1930s and 1940s before its founders turned toward hard-edge abstraction.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Deliberately planned, consciously staged imagery instead of spontaneous automatism or random dream logic
  • Precise, polished modeling with clear outlines and smooth, invisible brushwork
  • Analogical imagery: one form gradually metamorphosing into another (Lundeberg's Plant and Animal Analogies)
  • Symbolic juxtapositions of everyday objects arranged to guide the viewer toward a hidden meaning
  • Each picture organized around a single "mood entity" - a state of mind the painting exists to evoke
  • Stark, stage-like spaces with ambiguous or shifting scale

Key figures

  • Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) — Co-founder who wrote the New Classicism manifesto; her analogical paintings define the style
  • Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978) — Co-founder and influential Los Angeles teacher whose precise compositions framed the program
  • Philip Guston (1913-1980) — Early participant in the post-surrealist circle, later a leading Abstract Expressionist

Example works

  • Plant and Animal Analogies — Helen Lundeberg (1934-35)
  • Double Portrait of the Artist in Time — Helen Lundeberg (1935)

Sources

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