helen lundeberg - Louis Stern Fine Arts

Helen Lundeberg, c. 1948 Photo: Lou Jacobs Jr.
Helen Lundeberg’s landscape paintings invite us to ponder
the very essence of her artistic creativity and the enigma
it enfolds. Over the course of her long career she has
consistently stated that her landscapes are not abstractions
of specific places or visual reality, but rather are mostly
inventions painted in her studio, and that only a few are
based on drawings made out of doors. Formal structure,
emotional impact, and the illusions of space and dimension
have been her aesthetic goals from the very beginning of her
artistic life.
And yet, somewhat paradoxically, she has been equally quick
to stress her belief that an artist’s visual environment cannot
avoid influencing the nature of his or her imagery. “…I think
a painter must be influenced by what he sees, all the time, or
even by what he conceives is around him…Because I’ve been
looking all my life…It was one of my favorite occupations.
I’m terribly visual minded. And when I was a kid (in
Pasadena) and when we went for the Sunday afternoon drives
that people went for in those days, or went anywhere, I was
always in the back seat, looking at everything.” 1
What Lundeberg would have seen on those excursions was
the Pasadena of the teens and twenties, the years when the
city was young, still partly rural, and vastly different from the
Pasadena we know today. Back then it was the cultural and
social center of that particular part of Southern California;
Los Angeles was still in its infancy.
In 1912, at the age of four, Helen Lundeberg moved from
Chicago to Pasadena with her family, who were seeking a
more salubrious climate for reasons of her mother’s health.
They moved into a house in what was then the northeast part
of the city, about two blocks north of Washington Street.
Later, she recalled that the sidewalks ended about a block
from their home, creating a rural atmosphere because there
was a whole square block of open field, filled in the spring
with poppies and blue-eyed grass. “Because I was a child,
and small,” she said, “it seemed bigger than it was…And the
mountains (the San Gabriels), of course, (rose) up because
there weren’t any tall buildings to interfere…I really grew up
with the sight of the mountains.” 2 Her Self Portrait, 1933,
helen lundeberg
and the illusory landscape
by Diane D. Moran
(Plate 1), and the horizontal landscape entitled Sundial,
1934, (Plate 2) are but two examples of works in which
those mountains figure prominently as part of her memory
of childhood. The viewer of this exhibition will be able to
see their image in many paintings of later decades.
Despite her young age at the time, Lundeberg recalled
arriving in the city by train early in the morning. “…the sun
was shining, and there were orange groves, which I’d never
seen before…I have a…memory of that.” 3 A geological
feature that dominated the city was the Arroyo Seco, a
vast canyon spanned by the Colorado Street bridge. In the
course of the city’s growth, areas adjacent to the Arroyo
were set aside as public parks and, later, portions of the
Arroyo became the foundation for the Pasadena Freeway.
The Huntington Gardens, world-renowned, vast and varied,
provided Lundeberg with botanical specimens that fed her
lifelong interest in that field, many of which appeared in her
early works.
In a transcribed interview
with Lundeberg in 1974
Fidel Danieli noted that,
in fact, the aim of early
community planners was
to make city life somehow
rural. 4 Over the course of
her life, Lundeberg saw
Pasadena change from an
open and countrified town
to the crowded city that we
know today. It may be
difficult to imagine the old Pasadena of her youth, but
perhaps there is something of its essence to be felt in the
landscapes that we are privileged to see in this exhibition,
from the background of the early Self Portrait, (Plate 1) to
Desert Hills, 1967 (Plate 34).
WPA Mural History of the State of California,
Venice High School, c. 1939
In 1930 Lundeberg graduated from Pasadena Junior College
and through the generosity of a family friend who was
impressed with her artistic talent, enrolled at the Stickney
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