NEHMA | Collection - The Mirror (Enigma)

Helen Lundeberg

American
(1908–1999)

The Mirror (Enigma)
1934

Oil on canvas
37.75 x 31.75 x 1.75 in.
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
1986.28

In 1934, only a year out of art school, Helen Lundeberg joined her teacher Lorser Feitelson in a new movement they christened “Post-Surrealism,” dedicated to transcending what they saw as the limitations of surrealism. Their postsurrealist compositions presented specific objects arranged logically so as to accrue metaphorical associations and meanings, similar to the way disparate incidents and images were brought together in modernist poems by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. As Lundeberg stated, the goal was to create for the viewer “an emotional or mood-entity, or intellectual or idea-entity.”

While Lundeberg’s paintings were certainly not intended as biographical or confessional works, several of them presented her sexual anxieties, perhaps related to the unresolved status of her relationship with Feitelson. Lundeberg had begun an affair with her mentor, who was unable to extricate himself from his first unhappy marriage, and would not do so until more than two decades later. At that time, social codes prohibited the couple from openly living together, so for Lundeberg conventional married life and motherhood were not options.

Lundeberg’s odd postsurrealist still life The Mirror can be considered a self-portrait not of the artist’s physical body, but of a set of distinct yet interconnected symbolic parts. Chair legs support a veined plywood body draped with a skinlike sheet of paper, torn to demonstrate its vulnerability. Positioned to be the face of that body, a mirror has been tilted to reflect a naked, eyelike bulb; an open shell at hip level suggests the figure’s genitals. The mind, or eye, of this creation is a reflected light whose controlling power leaves its mark in the chair’s crisp, shadow silhouette. This “mirror,” reflecting the layers of thought and imagery that contribute to a postsurrealist “idea-entity,” is a raw, bare-boned portrait of the artist as a compartmentalized self, given life by a distanced, off-frame light source.

Michael Duncan

Keywords
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This object has the following keywords:

brown, chairs, floor, lighting fixtures, mirror, oil paint, post-surrealism, seashell*, shadow, shell, wall

brown
chairs
floor
lighting fixtures
mirror
oil paint
post-surrealism
seashell - The exoskeleton of salt-water mollusks, often used for jewelry or decorative objects.
shadow
shell
wall

Exhibition List

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

Alternate Realities , 9/1/1999 - 1/15/2000
Uses of the Real I , 1/20/2008 - 4/30/2011
Uses of the Real Part II , 7/1/2009 - 8/30/2010
Independent & Creative Impulse: Dialogues from the Collection , 8/16/2011 - 5/9/2014
Collecting on the Edge Part I , 9/15/2018 - 12/15/2018
Collecting on the Edge , 9/15/2018 - 5/4/2019
Collecting on the Edge Part II Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art , 1/17/2019 - 5/4/2019
Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction , 8/25/2020 - 7/9/2022

Also found in

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This object is a member of the following portfolios:

Collecting on the Edge

Collecting on the Edge Part II

Paintings

Women, Surrealism & Abstraction

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Helen Lundeberg