An unbalanced retrospective

First major exhibit of the late artist’s works gives short shrift to her key early period.

Exhibition on painter Helen Lundeberg has misplaced focus.

The life of Helen Lundeberg spanned the 20th century, almost exactly. In the first full-scale retrospective exhibition of paintings by the Los Angeles artist, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, the midpoint of that century quietly emerges as a decisive pivot in her work.

Artistically, the swing did not work out for the best.

At the Laguna Art Museum, “Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective” offers a revisionist look at her career. Conventional wisdom has it that the work from the 1930s and ’40s is her best, while the show argues that her 1960s paintings are the finest that she produced. But the proposed revision is unconvincing.

Among the assembled 58 paintings, most of the dozen that date from the 1930s to the end of World War II are captivating — exceedingly strange, not in flashy or dramatic ways but as murmuring enigmas.

Take “The Red Planet” (1934). Inside a small room, a black-and-white photograph of a comet shooting through the night sky is propped up on astronomy books stacked on the floor. The books are next to a pedestal table with an odd, skyblue circular top.

The composition is primarily a Constructivist-style arrangement of flat planes of color — floor, wall, baseboard, door, tabletop, books. Two glowing orbs of vivid color draw your eye.

The smaller orb is crimson, a thickly painted dot whose bottom edge is rimmed with a violet shadow. It appears to rest on the table below the larger orb — golden, like the sun, and hovering above in space.

It only takes a moment to realize that the golden sphere is actually the knob on a pale-green door behind the table, opened to an unseen exterior.

Lundeberg breathes miraculous space into the tightly organized picture through the deft deployment of shadows. Initially they don’t seem to line up in a logical way. The big one cast on the rear wall by the door suggests light flooding in from the side, but it seems at cross-purposes with the angled shadows cast by the table legs below and the stacked books opposite.

Shadows push away from one another, opening up the relatively contained interior space of carefully balanced colors. The light source for these subtle visual pyrotechnics is initially puzzling — but not for long. The shadows radiate outward. The light source is the sunny doorknob.

The bright glow of this common household “sun” casts deep shadows, including that violet arc beneath the “red planet” dot on the table. The doorknob, a conventional bit of domestic hardware, becomes a mysterious symbol of imaginative liberation — a metaphor for opening a door between interior and exterior worlds.

Lundeberg transforms an ordinary small room into a virtual solar system. Microcosm meets macrocosm — as another of her paintings is titled — and the membrane between them blurs.

Lundeberg had a precocious interest in French poet André Breton, German painter Max Ernst, Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí and — perhaps most important — Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. She knew his work firsthand from the great Louise and Walter Arensberg collection of Dada and Surrealist art, which filled their Hollywood house.

De Chirico’s brilliant civic landscape “The Soothsayer’s Recompense,” with its sun-blasted classical piazza, hung over the Arensbergs’ living room sofa. Among its more haunting features is a double image.

Amid raking shadows, a background pair of palm trees framed within a foreground archway and behind a brick wall creates the hallucinatory specter of an ancient Corinthian helmet. It looks away as a locomotive chugs by, the past watching the present as much as we are watching both.

The show’s guest curator, Ilene Susan Fort, also co-organized the compelling 2012