Elise Cavanna

Stage and film career

Born Elise Seeds in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Sally D. Burk and Thomas M. Seeds. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy and studied dancing with Isadora Duncan in Berlin, Germany. Cavanna was 6 feet tall and very svelte. She gave dance recitals in New York City until she began to dislike it. Then she became a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies.

Cavanna was a comedian with Joe Weber and Lew Fields before she entered motion pictures in 1926. Her first film was Love 'Em and Leave 'Em (1926) with Louise Brooks and Evelyn Brent. Next she performed as an "early morning customer" with Brooks and W.C. Fields in It's the Old Army Game (1926). She worked with Fields in four other of his films, most notably The Dentist, where her scenes as a writhing victim of the brutal dentist (Fields) were deemed so risque that they were edited out for television broadcast decades later. Her on-screen interplay with Fields was compared by film historian William K. Everson to that between Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont. Cavanna remained in films until the late 1930s, compiling more than twenty screen credits.

In 1932, while living in Los Angeles, she met and married Merle Armitage (1893–1975), a writer, book designer, musician and WPA administrator. She became more interested in visual art and art social circles after her marriage.

Art

In September 1933, Cavanna presented six abstract lithographs at a showing at Stendhals in Los Angeles, California. A newspaper review commented on the "cool precision of her lines and spots of tone." The art was best appreciated through the "mind's eye" rather than the eye itself. Cavanna's art was shown in October 1949 as part of the contemporary section in the California Centennials Exhibition of Art at the Los Angeles County Museum, Exposition Park. Oils, water colors, and prints from 20th-century artists were presented along with a historical section, which assembled early art. It displayed life in California from 1800 through 1870.

In 1937, Cavanna completed the 16′ x 6′ oil on canvas painting "Air Mail" for the Oceanside, California post office. The painting depicts a realistic but stylized airplane flying over a landscape that looks similar to California.

The Los Angeles Art Association exhibited Cavanna's work in a 1954 showing at 2425 Wilshire Boulevard. The four artists whose work was shown were known collectively as Functionists West. They were Stephen Longstreet, Helen Lundeberg, Cavanna, and Lorser Feitelson. By then the former actress signed her name simply, Elise. Cavanna and Feitelson presented only nonobjective paintings, though each worked in representational modes. Both artists were similar in "using only flat-colored, near geometrical forms", which either opposed or complemented each other. Cavanna was one of the first nonobjective painters in southern California. Each one of her pictures was brightly colored, filled with energy, and could be viewed as a separate portion of a frieze. Feitelson and Lundeberg wrote a manifesto in 1934, describing their art as post-surrealism. Their desire was to use art to communicate the connection between the conceptual and the perceptual.

Later years and death

In 1961, Cavanna co-authored a book with her husband, James Welton, entitled Gourmet Cookery for a Low Fat Diet. The volume contained 200 recipes for making fatless meals.

Elise Cavanna Welton died in Hollywood, California of cancer on May 12, 1963. She was 61 years old. She is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.