Lorser Feitelson was one of the leaders in the 1950s and 60s of what, in a Southern California context, is called Abstract Classicism, known elsewhere more generically as hard-edge abstraction. (By this time he had moved on from his previous interest in figurative Post-Surrealism.) Born in Georgia and raised in New York City, Feitelson moved to California in 1927 after significant travels in Europe, and spent the rest of his career based in Los Angeles.

Early in 1963, Feitelson became interested in lines for themselves, rather than as descriptions of forms, and from that point on, his canvases featured curved lines almost exclusively, as he experimented with color contrasts, negative space, and perceptual kinetics. The calligraphic compositions of paintings such as Marriage of Two Lines have been described as mirrored, doubled, dancing, even flirtatious; scholar Paul Karlstrom called them “pure gesture that engages the viewer with the intimacy of an embrace.” But the artist—though he acknowledged some of the figural references in these compositions—focused on the reductive rather than the associative nature of the images, maintaining that a painting “has to rest on one statement alone or it has nothing.”