This style was a significant reaction to the more painterly or gestural forms of Abstract expressionism, one of the United States’ primary painting movements at the time.
[9] Art critic Dave Hickey solidified the place of these 6 artists in The Los Angeles School: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Helen Lundeberg, and John McLaughlin, an exhibition held at the Ben Maltz Gallery of the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 2004-2005.
[11] In 2011, the style was featured prominently at the Getty Museum’s initial iteration of Pacific Standard Time, titled Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 , which showcased the artistic practices that characterized the postwar L.A. art scene.
[12] The exhibition highlighted selections from Louis Stern Fine Arts including Karl Benjamin’s Stage II (1958)[13] and Helen Lundeberg’s Blue Planet (1965).
[14] Louis Stern Fine Arts continues to exhibit and represent the estates of Hard-Edge painters, including Benjamin, Lundeberg, and Feitelson.
This style of hard-edge geometric abstraction recalls the earlier work of Kasimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian.