Elizabeth Hertz studied with the Cleveland-school artist William Zorach at the Art Students League in New York in the 1940s.  She also studied the work of American painter, Stanton MacDonald-Wright.  She was heavily influenced by his ideas of synchromism, a theory he and fellow painter Morgan Russel developed that placed a great emphasis on juxtapositions and reverberations of color and that sought to free art from a literal description of the world.  These ideas connected the qualities of colors to those of music, as well as to those of fellow artists Delacroix, the Impressionists, Cézanne, and Matisse.  Similarly, Hertz employs an abstract language of bold colors and geometric shapes that rely more on their dissonances and harmonies with one another than anything with direct association to the natural world.