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Elise Cavanna(1905 - 1962)
Artist, actress, dancer, chef and vocalist, Elise Cavanna Seeds Armitage Welton, known simply as Elise, was one of the pioneers of abstraction and modernism in Los Angeles. She studied art in her native Philadelphia with Arthur B. Carles and Daniel Garber, and was active in artistic and literary circles in New York, counting among her friends E. E. Cummings and Ernest Hemingway. She studied dance with Isadora Duncan and was a versatile, eccentric and striking woman--she was over six feet tall and in the 1930s sported purple hair. She became known as W. C. Fields' comic partner at the Ziegfeld Follies, and at Fields' request, came to Hollywood to act in his films. Soon after her arrival, she met and married the artistic and musical impresario Merle Armitage who encouraged her artistic talents; she soon gave up acting to devote herself exclusively to art.

Elise gained a reputation as a painter and printmaker and exhibited both in Los Angeles and New York. Her abstractions, based on such natural forms as bones or plants, geometric shapes, or even molecules themselves, have an innate rhythm and balance, for "when Elise views the world she resolves the things in it into their smallest possible denominator. This becomes the material with which she builds a new world...When you familiarize yourself with [an Elise abstraction] you readily discover the melodies and harmonies, the directions, progressions, and solutions, the sequences, tempos and dynamics which constitute its whole..." (Merle Armitage. Elise. An Article by Louis Danz and a Portrait by Beatrice Wood. New York: E. Weyhe, 1934, pp. 11-12).

Elise won a government commission to design the mural for the Oceanside Post Office in 1935 and her painting Out of Space was exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Experimenting with lithography, Elise made several editions with the premier Los Angeles printer Lynton Kistler and she also illustrated several books. Works by Elise are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her works were included in the 1995 traveling museum exhibition, Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945.

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