Abstract Impact
May 2008
The City of Los Angeles is constantly being formed and re-formed by newcomers and changing times, which may account for the widespread perception that Southern California only came of age culturally with the opening of the seminal Ferus Gallery (1957–66) by curator Walter Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz and the subsequent art boom. This notion could not be further from the truth. Los Angeles has been a creative center for talented artists from around the world since the 1920s, with a series of important galleries exhibiting the latest international trends. Southern California’s artists and collectors could view all the currents of European and American avant-garde without leaving town. Among the first to disseminate modernist ideas and artistic practice was Synchromist painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973), who returned from Paris and New York in 1919. As director of the Art Students League of Los Angeles, Macdonald-Wright was an influential teacher of progressive concepts and techniques in art and design. He was responsible for bringing to Los Angeles the latest examples of European and American art from New York’s Stieglitz and Daniel Galleries.European émigré artists of all disciplines began arriving in the 1920s. German artist and dealer Galka Scheyer moved to the West Coast in 1924 and began promoting the so-called "Blue Four"—Wassily Kandinsky, Alexei von Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee. In the 1930s and ’40s, artists such as Oskar Fischinger, Man Ray, Eugene Berman, Salvador Dalí, Hans Burkhardt and Rico Lebrun lived and worked in Los Angeles, attracted by the beauty of the landscape, the climate and the freewheeling way of life.
Until recently, the historical record of Southern California art has focused on the male artists of the period from 1930 to 1960, but, in reality, there were as many women as men involved in the evolution of ideas and the creation of advanced art. These women who flourished during the decades of L.A. modernism are worthy of note as they have not received the national recognition they deserve: Elise, Helen Lundeberg, June Wayne and Ynez Johnston. These well-educated and independent-minded artists made major contributions to the artistic dialogue during the early modernist period in Los Angeles. While none of them were part of a particular school or had a coterie of followers, their serious and iconoclastic approach to art-making and frequent exhibitions have been extremely influential on younger artists.
Elise (Cavanna Seeds Armitage Welton, 1902–63), a 6-foot-tall beauty with attention-grabbing purple hair, trained as an artist at the Pennsylvania Academy under Arthur B. Carles and as a dancer in Berlin with Isadora Duncan. At the invitation of W.C. Fields, a family friend, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue film acting. She and Fields had been comic partners at the Ziegfeld Follies, and she appeared as his slapstick foil in films during the early ’30s. Elise had more than 20 screen credits, but when she married Merle Armitage, a theater impresario, art collector, art critic, book designer and publisher, she chose to concentrate on her art. Their home overlooking Silver Lake became the gathering place for the renowned artistic salon started by poet and bookseller Jacob (Jake) Zeitlin who moved from Texas to Los Angeles in 1925 and became the patron of a large circle of artists and writers.
Elise was among the first non-objective painters in Los Angeles. Early lithographs and paintings are witty self-portraits, depictions of hands holding seed pods and abstract references to nature, but by the mid-1930s, she had taken to heart the lessons of Kandinsky’s theoretical treatise Point and Line to Plane (1926), dropping all representation from her oeuvre. In "Red" (1939), she uses the graceful repetition of line and pattern against a strong color field to create a delicately balanced composition that she may have intuited from her dance experience. Representation lingered in some works, which permit an analysis of the prevailing geometry. In "Out of Space" (1938), which was exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Elise established a horizon by modulating the background field from red to blue. She shaded circular forms to suggest planets and used perspective to elongate three-dimensional shapes that appear to float in outer space.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.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.RESOURCES
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles
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Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood, CA
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NoHo Modern, Los Angeles
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Spencer Jon Helfen Fine Arts, Beverly Hills, CA
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Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
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Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, CA
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Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles
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