California Art Review of Lorser Feitelson’s Allegorical Confessions, 1943-45

Kasmin is pleased to present Valley of Gold: Southern California and the Phantasmagoric, curated by Sonny Ruscha Granade and Harmony Murphy. Valley of Gold explores the aesthetic legacy of the European surrealists and others who worked with similar sensibilities on the art of Southern California. Examining the influence of this charged period, the exhibition traces how its effects percolated through later movements such as California abstraction, conceptual art, and Light and Space.

SAN FRANCISCO — I first became aware of the artist Jess (1923 – 2004) in the late 1960s, when I bought a copy of Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field (1960) at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop on Plympton Street, near Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jess’s ink drawing was the frontispiece of that singular volume, which was part of my introduction to the existence of alternatives to official verse culture. Although I went on reading Duncan, I did not see any more of Jess’s art until I came to New York in the mid-1970s and saw his work at the Odyssia Gallery, where I also saw pieces by Irving Petlin and, later, Robert Birmelin for the first time.

What are the chronologies of the catalogue raisonné projects for Feitelson and Lundeberg?

The Foundation placed a call for collectors in 2012. At that time we also began amassing data, photographing all work still in the Foundation’s collection, and visiting museums and private collections. I visited the Archives of American Art to view the Feitelson/Lundeberg Papers in 2012 and 2018, and visited the UCLA archives to view the Tobey C. Moss Gallery Records on Feitelson and Lundeberg. These archives have all been instrumental in filling gaps in provenance and locating information on untraced works.