Recognized as a pioneer of Hard-Edge abstraction, Lorser Feitelson began his artistic career in New York City as a self-taught artist. Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1898, as a child he moved to New York with his family, and was exposed to a range of art via museums and galleries, including Modern art at the 1913 Armory Show, where he encountered the work of Paul Cezanne, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse. Feitelson later received academic training in Paris during a brief stay in 1919. Between 1919 and 1927, Feitelson traveled frequently to and from New York and Paris. In Paris, he studied the works of Pablo Picasso and other artists who had shifted from Cubism to Neo-Classicism. In New York, he was an active member of the local art scene, and befriended artists such as Robert Henri and John Sloan.
In 1928, Feitelson relocated to Los Angeles after successfully launching his artistic career in New York and was given his first museum solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco later that year. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art also organized a solo exhibition for the artist a few months later.
During the 1930s, Feitelson became active in the Southern California art scene not only as an artist and educator but also as a curator, leading several prominent galleries while serving as the supervisor of Murals, Paintings, and Sculpture for the Southern California Works Progress Administration. Among his art students were budding muralists Ruben Kadish and Phillip Guston. The following decade brought greater recognition for the artist, as he became a leading figure in Los Angeles and continued to exhibit in solo and group exhibitions at museums throughout California. By the mid 1940s, he had experimented with freeform non-objective abstraction in a series of works known as Magical Forms; this significant body of work would eventually lead to his work as a pioneer of Hard-Edge abstraction.
In 1952, Feitelson was given a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Institute that received critical acclaim as his profile continued to rise among modern artists. In 1956, he launched a successful television career with the NBC series Feitelson on Art, which aired until the end of 1963. In 1959, he organized a landmark meeting of Abstract Classists that included Los Angeles-based artist John McLaughlin and critic Jules Langsner. Four Abstract Classists, the exhibition that would popularize the term “hard-edge” and the movement that inspired it, opened shortly after to positive reviews, marking the solidification of Feitelson’s place as an influential abstract painter.
The remainder of Feitelson’s career witnessed continued success with exhibitions in museums across the United States, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Phoenix Museum of Art, in addition to several significant museum acquisitions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist died of heart failure following an illness at the age of eighty in 1978.
