Wilshire Center

Elise Cavanna Seeds Armitage Welton was a Los Angeles artist known professionally simply as Elise. She is an almost forgotten part of the early history of Los Angeles modernism that stubbornly existed here during the unsympathetic ‘30s and ‘40s. A current exhibit features work from 1932 to 1940 and it’s a small sampling. Still, it shows how swiftly Elise developed her abstract vocabulary giving visual hints at the strong influences of Kandinsky and European Constructivism.

A flamboyant and versatile personality, Elise came West from Philadelphia to act in film at the request of W. C. Fields but quickly abandoned comedy and dance for printmaking, painting and later sculpture. Her first lithographs and drawings of seed pods and succulents push still recognizable natural forms to the brink of a lilting and sensuous abstraction. In prints like “Calla Lilies,” the always fluid line, wrapped around small nests of dark and light, builds a budding explosion of abstracted floral form.

As the images become more abstract they also become increasingly geometric and animated. Bright colored lines--marks that are delicate as a stray eyelash but placed with the tick mark precision of an accountant--dance with abandon on shallow pictorial planes in these works.

In general the paintings are heavy, weighed down with thick, uninspired paint that lacks the ethereal purity of her prints. Yet the images in paintings like “Balanced Moment” and “Realization” are powerful. They unite movement, logical geometry and free-form organics in an expressive and fluid exploration of form that still has a delightful capacity to surprise. (Turner Dailey, 7220 Beverly Blvd., to Aug. 26.)