The Mountain

Four women wearing gauzy dresses gather among vines and branches in a mountainous landscape. Though the forms of foliage and women are easily identifiable, the relationship between the figures and their fantastical landscape setting is ambiguous. The composition is painted on Celotex, an industrial fiberboard that the artist, Helen Lundeberg, chose for its unusual texture. Lundeberg was a seminal figure in the Los Angeles art scene and a pioneering force behind the movement of post-surrealism. Unlike European surrealists, who concentrated more on issues of irrationality and the subconscious, Lundeberg used a representational style to explore the way in which the real and the conceptual merge in the mind. She described this new artistic style as “fantasy with a classical sense of structure.”