Val Telberg

The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is painting. Work by Val Telberg is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and J. Paul Getty Museum.

• Name — Val Telberg • Born — February 14, 1910 • Birthplace — Moscow, Russia • Died — 1995 • Place of death — Southampton, New York • Known for — painting, photography • Movement — surrealism

His family moved to China in 1918 and he spent most of his youth there. He received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Wittenberg College in 1932. He returned to China, but would emigrate to the United States in 1938. He studied painting at the Art Student's League, New York, in 1942, where he was exposed to the surrealism movement and experimental film-making. It was here he met his future first wife, Kathleen Lambing (more famous as Kathleen Haven, the name she took after her second marriage), who taught him photography. For his first professional job in photography, Telberg was a portrait photographer, taking portraits of nightclub patrons in Florida and later Massachusetts. In 1945, he returned to New York and began to create photomontages through double exposure; many of these images had a surreal, dreamlike quality. In 1948, the Brooklyn Museum of Art held an exhibition of the photomontage works he produced with his wife. In 1987, he had a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.