Hilda Levy was one of the first artists to be granted a solo exhibition by the renowned Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (1908–2001). An accomplished Abstract Expressionist working in Southern California during the mid-twentieth century, Levy has since fallen into relative obscurity. This exhibition marks her first solo presentation in fifty-eight years and seeks to restore her place within the history of American women artists and Abstract Expressionism.

Born in Pinsk, Russia (now Belarus), Hilda Dorothea Minsky immigrated to the United States after World War I. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1937—the same year she married Joseph Levy. In 1947, she began studying with modernist painter Leonard Edmondson at Pasadena City College and pursued abstract figuration at the Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles. In the mid-1950s, UCLA launched an influential Extension program in modern painting, taught by graduate students including Henry Hopkins. This program introduced local artists and collectors to European and American modernism, and it is thought that Levy may have participated. In 1958, she furthered her studies with Adolph Gottlieb in UCLA’s summer program.

Levy entered the Southern California art scene at a pivotal moment. Prior to World War II, Impressionism and figuration dominated the region. In the postwar period, however, a new generation of artists challenged this conservatism, advocating for progressive ideas aligned with a modern society. Levy was among these artists. Beginning in 1952 and continuing for two decades, she participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions across the United States, earning awards and critical acclaim. 

This exhibition presents works spanning Levy’s entire career, with a particular emphasis on her production from the 1950s and early 1960s. It also includes select examples of her earliest abstract compositions and her later engagement with Pop art. Levy regarded non-objective art as especially suited to the postwar era. As she stated, “My type of painting, which takes the non-objective form, is a necessity in our contemporary world, which is largely composed of related concepts and abstract ideas.”

In 1957, Edward Kienholz and Walter Hopps founded the Ferus Gallery to introduce the contemporary avant-garde art to Los Angeles audiences. Levy was granted a solo exhibition that same year, making her the only female artist from Southern California to receive this distinction at the time. Alongside Northern California artists Jay DeFeo and Sonia Getchoff, she was also among the few women Abstract Expressionists represented by the gallery in its early years. Her exhibition featured recent watercolors and drawings, which critics Arthur Millier of the Los Angeles Times and Jules Langsner of Art News praised as inventive, poetic, and distinguished in their use of color. Shortly thereafter, Wallace Berman’s controversial exhibition containing an erotic image by the artist Cameron led to the temporary closure of the gallery on obscenity charges, overshadowing the critical response to Levy’s work.

Watercolor was Levy’s primary medium during the 1950s. Through energetic lines, gestural marks, and complex color relationships, she conveyed the emotional tenor of the era—marked by anxiety and uncertainty in the face of technological advancement and the threat of mass destruction. Some works incorporate collaged elements, suggesting fragmentation and instability in American life. In others, she applied bold, dark strokes over earlier passages, introducing a sense of structure and balance akin to grid systems that organize visual dynamism. During this period, Levy also produced pencil and ink drawings whose incisive, controlled gestures invite comparison to the graphic works of Cy Twombly. These works capture the existential tensions of a postwar society.

In subsequent years, Levy engaged with emerging artistic practices in California, including collage, assemblage, and installation. Critics responded positively to her material experimentation. She combined unconventional materials with traditional media, applying them across varied supports while brushing, dripping, dabbing, and wiping fluid pigments to explore texture and surface. She also layered collage elements both beneath and atop translucent washes, investigating the interplay of intuition and emotion central to Abstract Expressionism.

During the 1960s, Levy continued to exhibit widely. Two major solo exhibitions—at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1960 and at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1963—affirmed her artistic significance. Around 1964, she began to increase the scale of her work and develop a more expansive, cosmic visual language. Linear forms evolved into short strokes resembling crosses, stars, and asterisks dispersed across the picture plane, functioning simultaneously as discrete forms and unified fields. By the end of the decade, circular and wheel-like motifs emerged alongside more precise outlines and a brighter palette, developments partly associated with her adoption of oil painting. Her transition from Abstract Expressionism to an Abstract Pop idiom was thus complete.

Following the death of her husband in 1972, Levy withdrew from her demanding exhibition schedule and ceased painting. Over time, her contributions to Abstract Expressionism faded from public memory.

     – Dr. Ilene Susan Fort, Curator Emerita, American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art