Lorser Feitelson - Career Success

Career Success

Like all serious Modernist painters of the time, Feitelson wanted to continue his study/practice in Europe. He made his first journey to Paris in 1919 and enrolled as an independent student in life drawing at the Académie Colorossi. While in Paris, he also made numerous trips to Corsica, Italy, and sketches from his time there formed the basis for later works featuring peasants as subjects. After numerous trips to Europe, and before returning home to the States for good in 1927, Feitelson exhibited at Paris’ famous Salon d'Automne.

In November, 1927, Feitelson moved to Los Angeles and by 1930 was working in the Post Surrealist style. According to Lundeberg, who authored the pair’s mission statement in response to the European Surrealist movement, Feitelson “wanted the utilization of association, the unconscious, to make a rational use of these subjective elements. Nothing of automatism about it. The name he had for this idea at first was ‘New Classicism ‘ or ‘Subjective Classicism.’ As Jules Langsner suggested in his catalogue for Post Surrealists and Other Moderns in 1935 at the Stanley Rose Gallery in Los Angeles, post-surrealism “affirms all that Surrealism negates.”

During this period, Feitelson was also assigned, with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, to oversee the WPA murals project on the West Coast. Though few examples of Feitelson’s design are extant, the large-scale narrative requirements of the mural format are in evidence in some of his larger Post-surrealist works. Flight Over New York at Twilight and Eternal Recurrence are two powerful examples of Feitelson’s technical acumen as well as his dynamic visual style.