American (1902-1963)
Six feet tall, sometimes sporting purple hair, Elise Seeds was proud of her eccentricities. Married twice, once to the impresario and writer Merle Armitage, she ultimately became known as simply, Elise. She was a true Renaissance woman. As a dancer, she studied under the great Isadora Duncan. As a comedienne and actress – her first movie was Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em in 1926, and later served as W. C. Fields’ comic partner as in The Dentist of 1932. But art collectors know her as a serious painter of easel works, murals, and as a printmaker. In 1933 she made her artistic debut with some abstract lithographs shown at Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles. Their non-objective subject matter may have been influenced by her Hollywood crowd, many of whom were artists, architects and musicians of modern persuasion who had fled the stifling policies of Hitler. Later she was paired in exhibits with local modernist greats Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson. While several Southern California women artists are known for their artistic experimentation, Seeds exceeded them by going beyond representationalism into pure color, shapes, and design and thus establishes herself as almost the first pure non-representational artist in Southern California.