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Statement for MOMA "Americans 1942 Catalogue" 1942

Helen Lundeberg

I was born in Chicago in 1908; since the age of four I have lived and worked in Southern California. In 1930 I had the good fortune to receive an art school scholarship which permitted me to work and study for three years under the guidance of Lorser Feitelson. thanks to him, I avoided the limited technical tricks and pseudo-philisophical vaporings usually dished out in art schools. The same turn of mind which stimulated my college-day interest in the biological sciences and the technical aspects of literature, undoubtedly motivated my eagerness to investigate the intricacies of aesthetic structure and mechanism in all the significant phases of art, form the ancient masters to those of our own period; in other words, that which makes a graphic expression a work of art. 

I am, apparently, a classicist by nature as well as conviction. By classicism I mean, not traditionalism of any sort, but that highly conscious concern with aesthetic structure which is the antithesis of intuitive, romantic, or realistic approaches to painting. My aim, realized or not, is to calculate, and reconsider, every element in a painting with regard to its function in the whole organization, or entity, of that painting. That is the classic attitude, and Postsurrealism is the contemporary and vital expression of that attitude, a classisism which attempts to arrive arrive at aesthetic impeccability through subjective, rather