This is Lorser Feitelson

Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) was an artiste 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 relatives relocated rapidly after his birth. His rise to inflection occurred after he moved to California in 1927.

Feitelson, along later 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 future 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 society of painters. A revised bank account of this exhibition re-titled West Coast Hard Edge was presented in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and next 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 aforementioned artists, pioneered a motion that has been much-admired 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 other hard-edge painters as the Los Angeles School.

These artists made mysterious contributions to the forward movement of American abstract painting. According to Hickey: “The New York School painters would Make their idiom by internalizing abstraction, psychologizing it gone Freud and Jung. The California painters take the opposite route by radically externalizing the surrealism of experience in the West. Their presumption, that surreality, visual confrontation and splendor have their roots in the innate and social world rather than the autonomous self, set art on the West Coast clear 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 settled artists the privilege of their sanity in a manic, narcissistic cultural moment and, in act out so, created the conditions out of which the language of art in Southern California art would forward movement in the late twentieth century.”