The Washburn Gallery will present the first exhibition of paintings by the California artist, Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978), since his Whitney Museum Memorial in 1979. Feitelson's previous New York exhibition was held at The Daniel Gallery in 1925. The forthcoming exhibition at the Washburn Gallery will concentrate on Feitelson's linear paintings of the 1960s: their perfect surfaces, technicolors and remote elegance suggest the emerging Los Angeles art scene in those years. James Fitzsimmons wrote about Feitelson in the 1977 October – November issue of Art International and in particular of the 1960s as follows:
In 1963, Feitelson began the series of minimal line paintings and found himself so intrigued with the quality of the lines as lines rather than as descriptions of form that he decided to concentrate exclusively on the linear element. In the series which followed this decision, a process of minimalization occurred inwhich form and color were greatly simplified. Feitelson did not consider this reduction as an end in itself, but rather as a means of eliminating elements which might otherwise detract from the all-important line...
The individual quality of the line is crucial. Feitelson has shown that with the most subtle adjustments of width and volume, and with the meticulous calibration of curve, his lines can be variously serene, exciting, dignified, lyrical, sensual or austere. They can be diamond hard or as fluid as flame, as rapid as a bolt of lightning or as languorous as drifting seaweed. He was especially intrigued with thepossibilities of the hermaphroditic line which he had long admired in Oriental art...
Viewed either as an elegant ribbon of red flowing gracefully through space or as a red void behind two richly curved hard-edged forms, the line mesmerizes the viewer with its consummate vitality and grace. Within that line, refined, distilled, and purified, are the aesthetic impulses of Feitelson's entire career.