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Image of Untitled, (Geometric Composition)

Elise Seeds

American
(1902–1963)

Untitled, (Geometric Composition)
circa 1936

Oil on canvas
22.75 x 25 x 1.5 in.
Gift of the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation
2004.37

With her six-foot frame and dyed purple hair, Elise Cavanna Seeds was by all accounts a stunning presence as well as a trailblazing Los Angeles modernist. Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she was a multifaceted artist who enjoyed a career as a dancer and actress in New York theater before moving west to work as a comedienne in Hollywood films.

By the mid-1930s Seeds had returned full force to painting. Venturing boldly into geometric abstraction, she created Untitled (Geometric Composition), which stands as an accomplished and prescient foray into nonobjective expression at a time when representational art in the region reigned supreme. With a limited palette of neutral hues and a few basic shapes, she succeeds in conveying a feeling of movement, informed, perhaps, by her years as a dancer. Notably, the large, partitioned rectangular form sustains a remarkable buoyancy, giving the impression of sailing unmoored in infinite space. At the same time, though, that it glides through the air, it supports some intriguing internal dynamics. The two gray polygonal planes within it at left, for instance, thrust toward the center to animate the field and to counter the placid composure of the like-colored rectangle and square that bond across the way. Meanwhile, the beige expanse on which these lunging polygons ride plays perceptual games with the viewer as it draws the eye, by turns, inward and outward through the pull of its origami-type folds.

And what is to be made of the small, dark square that hovers below in the void? Is it an offshoot of the long, black stripe that divides the flying behemoth above it, and will it escape its airy milieu through the gap at right in the painting’s internal frame? Sparking inquisitive thought, this seemingly simple but slyly subversive abstraction bears a host of subtle complexities that engage the mind and enchant the eye even as the questions they raise tauntingly stay beyond reason’s reach.

Susan Ehrlich

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abstraction, black, blue, gray, lines, rectangles, squares, white

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