Lorser Feitelson and the Invention of Hard Edge Painting

Lorser Feitelson, one of the most underrated figures of his era, distilled abstract forms from figurative art, extrapolating shapes from nature and the body to create evocative, spatially ambiguous compositions. Over the course of his sixty years of art making, Feitelson developed stylistic shifts that follow a lively, logical progression. His career tracks a kind of mini-art historical survey, moving from Cubism to Post-Surrealism to biomorphic abstraction to hard-edged geometric abstraction to minimal line paintings. His route to the hard edge is an unusual one, without the ties to Mondrian of other geometric painters such as McLaughlin, Leon Polk Smith, and Burgoyne Diller. By deriving his hard-edged forms from the shapes of the human body and the physical world, Feitelson demonstrated a rigorous abstract and conceptual distillation of figuration that was ahead of its time.