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.