Helen Lundeberg (1908–99), a tall, gentle woman with an ethereal demeanor, grew up in Pasadena and started painting in 1930 under the tutelage of Lorser Feitelson, who eventually became her husband. He was a pioneering modernist and dynamic, well-regarded teacher, who had moved to Los Angeles in 1927 fresh from successful exhibitions in Paris and New York. By 1934 they co-founded Post-Surrealism, the first homegrown Southern California art movement, which adopted rational formal comparisons to critically interpret the literary and theatrical currents of international Surrealism. Lundeberg’s first venture into complete abstraction, "A Quiet Place" (1950), was an accident. She took out a new canvas and painted background rectangles to suggest walls and floors, an exit to the outdoors. She found it very disconcerting that the painting seemed finished, so she put it aside. Lundeberg wasn’t ready to discard the referential objects in her work, but in 1958 she painted "The Road," the first in a series in which she deliberately used flat, unmodulated geometry to suggest interiors, landscapes, shadows and lights.
 
After that, Lundeberg consciously excised all the still life objects that typified her psychologically astute and allegorical Post-Surrealist works from the 1930s and 1940s. Paintings like "Sunny Corridor" (1959), "Interior with Painting" (1960) and "Marina" (1961) were increasingly abstract. Lundeberg was particularly fond of "Marina," an extreme example of simplification in which two harmonious colors and very basic shapes imply water and land. She never painted from nature, but purified her imagery through summary and synthesis, describing imaginary vistas that allude to reality. The titles of these works reflect her three-dimensional intentions.
 
About 1930, through Armitage, Elise met and collaborated with the lithographer Lynton Kistler, who later in the decade encouraged Lundeberg to make lithographs, enticing her with zinc plates he brought to her home studio. During this decade both Elise and Lundeberg visited the salon of Louise and Walter Arensberg, prodigious collectors who settled in Hollywood in 1921. The Arensbergs amassed a foundational collection of vanguard art by Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Piet Mondrian and others (now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art), and generously opened their holdings for study. Both Elise and Lundeberg were active in the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s and early ’40s, contributing prints, paintings and architectural decorations. Lundeberg and Feitelson saw Elise frequently in the first half of the 1950s, exhibiting together at the Los Angeles Art Association in 1954 as Functionists West. Their goal was to reinterpret Southern California in modern forms, breaking free from New York influences.
 
In 1959, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a significant show, "Four Abstract Classicists," curated by art critic Jules Langsner, which featured Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin. But Lundeberg was not included among these West Coast painters of hard-edged abstraction (a descriptive term applied to the group by Lawrence Alloway when the exhibit subsequently traveled to England and Ireland). Nevertheless, in 1962, the Whitney Museum of American Art selected Lundeberg’s inscrutable "Interior with Painting" for its exhibition "Geometric Abstraction in America," recognizing her role in the generational shift away from Abstract Expressionism toward the cooler aesthetics of the 1960s.
 
June Wayne (b. 1918) is spirited, outspoken and controversial; she is a force. She came to Los Angeles in 1941 to study production illustration for the aircraft industry at Cal Tech/Art Center School in Pasadena, but did not settle permanently in Southern California with her husband and young daughter until late 1945. Wayne joined the milieu around John Entenza’s Arts & Architecture magazine, met Lundeberg and formed an intellectually rewarding friendship with Langsner, with whom she shared a passion for science, literature and art.