A drive through a Los Angeles tunnel awakened her curiosity about optical phenomena, particularly focal and peripheral vision, which she explored for its potential as a new means of narrative painting. Wayne’s paintings from 1946–47, known mostly through reproduction since primarily preparatory drawings remain, derive from principles she learned in production illustration. They examine reflections, binocular vision and multiple foci, among other optical effects. In January 1951, Wayne started an oil painting she eventually titled "Strange Moon." A month later, working in lithography with Kistler, she continued exploring how to move two floating disc-like forms sequentially in and around a tightly modulated grid while controlling the eye path of the spectator. These formal experiments anticipated Op Art by more than a decade.
 
Literature has also had an important influence on Wayne as a source for allegory, style, symbols and techniques. Starting in 1948, she immersed herself in Franz Kafka’s comical and menacing world, inventing a symbolic lexicon of ideograms that refer to his texts. In three different paintings titled "Cryptic Creatures: Kafka Series" (1948/1962) and "Moving Creatures: Kafka Series" (1948) as well as "The Elements" (1951)—all part of the larger Justice Series based on Kafka’s The Trial—Wayne constructs clear horizontal or vertical planes of contrasting colors on top of which her narrative is enacted. Resembling filmstrips, the ideograms progressively move and mutate into one another along a predetermined path for the viewer to follow. As in a musical score, Wayne maps out her selected symbols for night, day, fire, water, rain, earth, sky, the human heart and the atom bomb to form a serpentine chain of allusions, challenging the mind to decipher their arcane meanings. In the first half of the 1950s, The Green Child, an allegorical novel by the art historian Herbert Read, also had an enormous impact on Wayne’s ideas about truth, beauty and the use of crystalline grids.
 
The youngest of the four, Ynez Johnston (b. 1920) arrived in Los Angeles in 1951, shy and waif-like, as the recipient of a six-month Huntington Hartford Foundation Residency, recommended by Wayne and Langsner, among others. By then, she had received grants that allowed her to spend several years in Mexico, travel to Europe and live in Paris. She had developed a personal style that synthesized her interests in early Christian art, Persian and Indian miniatures, Peruvian textiles, and the School of Paris, particularly Picasso, Klee, Dubuffet and Miró.

"Dark Jungle" (1950) was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art from her "New Talent" exhibition there in 1950. Every inch of the richly colored painting is covered with fanciful drawings of people, animals, deities and buildings that teeter on abstraction. A figurative border reminiscent of Picasso’s abstract line drawings for Honoré de Balzac’s Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) surrounds the center rectangle, in which the main narrative unfolds within a stacked architectural maze.

In Los Angeles, Johnston shared a studio with Leonard Edmondson, a friend from undergraduate days at the University of California, Berkeley, where she conceived a lifelong passion for making etchings. The small, complex etching "Square with Monuments" (1952) was inspired by a trip to Rome. Johnston uses a calligraphic line and employs extraordinary shifts and reversals of scale to create the crowded narrative in which plants, animals, humans, machines, deities, architecture and geography have equal emphasis. She suspends time, conflating multiple perspectives and events, with human figures and animals emerging out of the architectural interiors and exteriors into an imaginative whole.
 
As Johnston became aware of the New York School, a friend encouraged her to paint more freely and on larger canvases, in the new Abstract Expressionist style. "Amusement Land," a pastel and ink drawing from 1956, shows her responding with color and line to these new ideas. Her involvement with this style turned out to be a short detour, but it led her to a new way of working with a type of material she calls "plastic metal" on canvas, which gives it a hard, raised surface on which to draw her fantastic imagery while it is wet, rubbing dry pigments into the lines.

Los Angeles is still rediscovering itself as a place of culture and reclaiming past accomplishments. In the 20th century, there was more opportunity than ever for a woman to live her life and make art on her own terms. Elise, Helen Lundeberg, June Wayne and Ynez Johnston did just that. In their search for new forms of expression, each of these women courageously infused qualities of sensuality and femininity into their work, stimulated by the light, color and atmosphere of their adopted city.
 
Donna Stein, an independent art historian, curator and essayist, is Director of Development for the University of Southern California, Roski School of Fine Arts.